Women Drug Traffickers

Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime

Elaine Carey

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780826351982
• eBook ISBN: 9780826351999
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In the flow of drugs to the United States from Latin America, women have always played key roles as bosses, business partners, money launderers, confidantes, and couriers—work rarely acknowledged. Elaine Carey's study of women in the drug trade offers a new understanding of this intriguing subject, from women drug smugglers in the early twentieth century to the cartel queens who make news today. Using international diplomatic documents, trial transcripts, medical and public welfare studies, correspondence between drug czars, and prison and hospital records, the author's research shows that history can be as gripping as a thriller.

CHAPTER ONE

FOREIGN VICES

Drugs, Modernity, and Gender

IN THE 1920S AND 1930S, MEXICAN OFFICIALS STRUGGLED TO UNITE people under new ideas of nationhood in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. That search for identity would come at the expense of Mexico’s foreign-born population, who would become linked in the public mind—often falsely—to crime and drugs. Racializing crime occurred in the United States and Canada as well, and, in the 1920s and 1930s especially, foreign residents and citizens in all countries endured the public’s fears of drugs and vice. Foreign men and women served as vehicles to construct arguments of deviancy but also new conceptions of nation. Chinese immigrants bore the brunt of these ideas, due to racism and because native-born and mestizo Mexicans perceived that they presented economic competition. Foreign-born men and women who used or trafficked drugs or who were perceived to have done so were sensationalized as threats to the emerging Mexican nation. In turn, immigrant doctors, businesspeople, pharmacists, and countless others found themselves labeled by their neighbors, including local and national politicians and bureaucrats as well as ordinary citizens, as the architects of vice and depravity. In other words, certain people associated other citizens or immigrants as illicit and dangerous to the emerging nation.

In April 1935, Juan de Dios Bojórquez, the secretary of the interior for the Mexican state of Durango, received a letter from M. Durán, a concerned citizen. In the letter, the author complained about his neighbor, Vida Nahum Altaled. He wrote:

In this town [Durango] lives a woman of Turkish origin whose name is Vida Nahum Altaled who owns an establishment called the TIPTOP precisely in the main square, the source for most Durango addicts who require that which is indispensable to mitigate the effects of withdrawal.

Ms. Vida Nahum Altaled lives in a love relationship with her brother, and they make frequent trips to bring—as they say “new blood”—young women that they exploit in this city. . . . In the house of Nahum, people gamble and drink, and she provides drugs and women to her friends. She has never been punished due to the complicity of the Durango police that has to do with the police commander. Besides, this lady has entry papers to the Republic and then she has Izquierdo [the chief of police] to defend her when questioned. I hope these facts serve to help the work of moralization.¹

Bojórquez pursued this citizen’s complaint by forwarding the letter to the governor of the state of Durango. In turn, Bojórquez initiated a criminal investigation of Nahum and her brother Sam. When, how, or who conducted the investigation remained undocumented. Yet, by June 21, 1935, the investigation ended with Leopoldo Alvarado, the subsecretary of the state of Durango, concluding that Nahum Altaled “lived an honest life and was dedicated to her business of selling clothes.” Moreover, she and her brother were not lovers, but Sam was living with her while he was getting a divorce.² Thus, the state of Durango closed the case.

Despite the brevity of the investigation, the siblings Vida and Sam Nahum illuminate the complex intersections between modernity, gender, alcohol and drug abuse, prostitution, and financial gain in ways that contrast with the ideals of a new nation with its focus on hygiene, sanitation, political order, and legal economic growth. The brother and sister drew the suspicion of their neighbors for a number of reasons. First, they were foreigners in a highly nationalistic postrevolutionary Mexico. Originally from Turkey—a country known for its production of opium—they made frequent trips abroad to conduct and support their clothing retail business. Their success as entrepreneurs appeared to have fueled the suspicions of their native-born neighbors.

Their perceived economic success, their country of origin, and their physical mobility drew concern from a fellow citizen at a time of heightened nationalism during the 1930s and growing concern over vices that might undermine the social health and hygiene of the nation. The Mexican government embarked on a campaign to improve social hygiene and people’s health after years of revolution and economic stagnation. Its leaders turned to controlling vices such as selling and using drugs that they perceived degenerated the society and undermined the concepts of the new nation and the modernization efforts to rebuild the battered country.

After the revolution, Mexican elites relied upon and embraced certain narratives of European superiority that had circulated during the Porfiriato and the early years of Mexican modernization to set them apart from the lower classes.³ Yet, these tropes grew complicated with evolving concepts of crime and nation. Thus, the Nahums’ ability to accumulate wealth and establish a business that allegedly thrived on vice led the state government of Durango to undertake an investigation initiated by a single letter of complaint. The Nahums’ ties to the police, asserted in the denunciation, also revealed an increasing local concern over police corruption in the postrevolutionary period. The perceived ability of foreigners to bribe and manipulate certain police officers for financial gain or protection led to considerable numbers of investigations and speculations. Moreover, Durán, the letter’s author, suspected Vida, a successful immigrant woman, of sexual deviancy with her brother, buying into the era’s rhetoric of xenophobic nationalism. One can only suspect that Durán may have owed her money or had an ongoing argument with the Nahums over disputed property or some other matter.

In the 1930s, after years of civil war and violence, the Mexican government tried to rebuild the nation and modernize. No easy task. From 1926, the Mexican revolutionary government encountered the Cristeros, a counter-revolutionary faction that protested many new anticlerical laws. Peasants and elites challenged the revolutionary government in other ways, undermining attempts to rebuild the nation.⁴ Mexico endured years of upheaval that were then followed by efforts to rebuild and modernize the nation. During the revolutionary and then the Cristero fighting, the United States militarized its border with Mexico due to the flows of people fleeing the violence. Ironically, in the midst of this militarization, the United States embarked on its first war on drugs. As the violence subsided in Mexico, both nations became increasingly concerned about the impact of drug addiction on the health of their citizens—Mexicans and Americans—associating physical health with the general health of their respective nations.

The intersections between nation building and narcotics that arose from the 1910s to the early 1930s informed gender, race, nationalism, and modernity.⁵ Mexico’s official government policy shifted in step with that of the United States. These coordinated moves reveal the interconnectedness of policies on both sides of the border, a scenario that created shared narconarratives. Rather than providing an extensive policy history, I will examine these themes through the quotidian experiences of people who transgressed certain spaces in the pursuit of profit. Their personal movements across borders and their passage through diverse social spaces generated similar discourses and ideas about drugs among both the elites and the emerging middle classes, and how they envisioned the lower classes and immigrants. In this era, from the 1910s to 1936, people were highly mobile, and their mobility illustrated a period of rapid change. Sources and documents from the era demonstrate how policy makers contextualized a shared language, experience, and rhetoric of narcotics that reflected concerns of “foreign contagion.”⁶ As elites adopted moral codes of conduct in North America, they constructed a gendered language of deviancy as it pertained to drug use, trafficking, and addiction.⁷ In Mexico and the United States, immigrants—whether from Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in the Americas—became targets of repression and were depicted as a threat to the moral and physical health and the general good of the nation. The development of the “other” as a “contagion” shadowed national policies. Conversely, Mexican women in the drug trade, although lacking modern methodology and technology, were relentless in their entrepreneurial pursuits. Informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism, I consider how the United States and Canada applied these internal constructs of deviancy to control their more exotic neighbor to the south, Mexico.⁸

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEXICAN DOPE

The use of narcotics and mind-altering substances has a long history in Mexico. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún wrote about intoxicating mushrooms, or teonánacatl (flesh of the gods), in the sixteenth century.⁹ Despite their interest in documenting the use of previously unknown plants, Spanish colonists in Mexico attempted to abolish the use of mind-altering substances among Amerindians in religious ceremonies. Their practices undermined the Spanish clergy’s evangelization efforts.¹⁰ Although ingesting psilocybin, the toxin found in certain mushrooms, remained common, the Spanish associated these practices with indigenous religious beliefs that were deemed offensive to the Catholic Church. Spanish clerics documented three separate types of psychoactive mushrooms, but there were actually many more—over fifty have now been identified.¹¹

The struggle to control the use of mind-altering substances (such as mushrooms and other plants), narcotics (opiate derivatives such as morphine and heroin that induce sleepiness), and marijuana led to continued struggles and growing concern for scholars, medical professionals, and politicians that has continued into the modern period. By the Porfiriato, Sahagún’s initial list of psychoactive plants of the sixteenth century had greatly expanded. Beginning in the 1700s, European travelers came to believe that marijuana was indigenous to Mexico because of its ubiquitous presence.¹² The idea that marijuana was indigenous to Mexico continued to circulate into the twentieth century, informing policy arguments in the United States to the present day. Marijuana actually is native to Asia, not the Americas, and the Spanish introduced marijuana (hemp) during the colonial era for the purpose of making rope. Yet, even scholars of narcotics associated marijuana with Mexican workers who allegedly introduced it to the United States.¹³ Thus, marijuana usage became associated with Mexicans of working-class or lower-class origin, and the plant’s origin itself remained an accepted “truth” about Mexico.

Notwithstanding, the cultivation of poppy and the production of opium and its derivatives grew in Mexico, although poppy too is not indigenous to the Americas. By the early 1800s, poppy had been introduced in Mexico, particularly in the northern states, by Chinese immigrants who grew it for medicinal and personal use. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, poppy was grown in Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango, and it later spread to Tamaulipas and Veracruz.¹⁴ By the 1870s, poppy could be found in Michoacán, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero, as well as northern Guatemala.¹⁵ Mexico as well as Guatemala provided an excellent environment for poppy cultivation due to the soil and to mostly full sun exposure for much of the year.

Travelers to Mexico in the 1800s circulated the belief that the Mexican people were especially prone to vices and alcoholism, but few travelers directly and specifically discussed the use of narcotics or marijuana.¹⁶ Their journals documented the exotic aspects of Mexico, accounts similar to narratives written about Asia and Africa. Marijuana, opium, and cocaine could be found, but their intoxicating features only entered the popular imagination of Mexicans by the mid- to late 1800s. Narratives of drug use and alcoholism came to be associated with Mexicans. In Mexico, people found items such as cocaine cordials and opiate derivatives such as morphine and heroin on the shelves of local pharmacies, just as they did in the rest of North America. Yet that availability was reduced in the 1910s and 1920s due to the revolution, which cut off supply lines.

Mexico’s role in Andean cocaine and Asian heroin flows emerged early in the 1900s, much to the consternation of officials influenced by the concerns of northern diplomats, ministers, politicians, and policing agents. At international meetings prior to the Mexican Revolution, politicians, ministers, and medical doctors gathered to construct policies to stem the flow of narcotics. The United States became increasingly concerned about opiate use during its occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. The prevalence of opium use in the Philippines troubled missionaries, who in turn reported their findings to U.S. government officials.¹⁷ For example, Episcopal minister Charles H. Brent traveled to the Philippines, where he noted the use of narcotics; his experience there led to his global campaign against narcotics, which was adopted by the United States.¹⁸

By the early 1900s, Brent’s influence on the question of narcotics and trafficking had taken hold. Controlling international drug flows led to a growing interest in Mexico. In their report to the U.S. Senate, the American delegates to the International Opium Conference, Bishop Brent, Hamilton Wright, and Henry J. Ford, reported a growing crisis south of the border that they believed would continue to have serious implications.

A recently enacted Canadian statute not only forbids the importation of this form of the drug, but its manufacture, transshipment, or exportation. The Attorney General has held that under our opium-exclusion act of February 9, 1909 prepared opium may not be imported into the United States for immediate transshipment. Mexico has no law on the subject. The result is that the great mass of Macanise opium is brought to San Francisco and immediately transshipped by sea to Western Mexican ports, from whence it is added to the direct Mexican import, is mostly smuggled into the United States across the Mexican border.¹⁹

Although Mexico produced opiates, in the early 1900s it also served as a site of transshipment of Asian contraband, whether opiates or Chinese workers, to the United States. Lack of oversight in Mexican ports drew suspicion from the country’s northern neighbors. With the emerging drug war and the inflammatory rhetoric that surround...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Selling Is More of a Habit: Women and Drug Trafficking, 1900–1980
• Chapter One Foreign Vices: Drugs, Modernity, and Gender
• Chapter Two Mules, Smugglers, and Peddlers: The Illicit Trade in Mexico, 1910s–1930s
• Chapter Three The White Lady of Mexico City: Lola la Chata and the Remaking of Narcotics
• Chapter Four Transcending Borders: La Nacha and the “Notorious” Women of the North
• Chapter Five The Women Who Made It Snow: Cold, Dirty Drug Wars, 1970s
• Conclusion Gangsters, Narcs, and Women: A Secret History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index