Mexico’s Dirty War on Drugs: Source Control and Dissidence in Drug Enforcement

Abstract

This essay focuses on the local effects and unintended consequences of the US drug war in Mexico. Mexico’s internal divisions and political challenges go beyond its role in the regional drug traffic. US drug-control policies intersected with and exacerbated many of Mexico’s domestic problems, including what activists and scholars have begun calling la guerra sucia (Dirty War), a period from the late 1950s to the early 1980s during which Mexico’s ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), violently put down dissidence. Whereas a rather clean and organized image of United States–Mexico narcotics diplomacy emerges at the upper echelons of policy making, a focus on drug enforcement actors in Mexico charged with executing drug control and carrying out the PRI’s concurrent policies of domestic repression during the 1960s and 1970s reveals a very different picture. Using materials from Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate (DFS), a PRI intelligence agency, this essay demonstrates how the PRI’s actions against leftist threats shaped the Mexican government’s response to US drug issues, especially in rural, drug-producing areas already prone to political instability. As drug enforcement collided with the PRI’s efforts at domestic repression, it empowered certain state actors at the expense of others and led to a number of violent abuses.