How the ‘Mexican miracle’ kickstarted the modern US–Mexico drugs trade
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Mercoledì, Aprile 10, 2024
The flow of cheap and deadly fentanyl over the border into the US has also fuelled an opioid epidemic that has killed over 1 million Americans since 2000.
Key Points:
- The flow of cheap and deadly fentanyl over the border into the US has also fuelled an opioid epidemic that has killed over 1 million Americans since 2000.
- It is a dark side to the so-called “Mexican miracle” that transformed the country’s economy between the 1940s and 1970s.
- Stimulated by the Mexican and US governments’ promotion of infrastructure improvements and mass migration, the drug trade fuelled further lawful economic development throughout the country.
Cops, cartels and cash crops
- Many of Durango’s battled-scarred and poverty-stricken former miners adapted to the national and global turbulence by turning to opium poppies, a profitable (and since 1920, illegal) cash crop.
- Sap from opium poppies provides the raw material for drugs like morphine and heroin.
- In response, US officials like Harry J. Anslinger promoted a “crusade” against the drug trade on both sides of the border.
- In 1944, a joint US–Mexican expedition uncovered the largest opium plantation ever discovered in Mexico: the size of 325 football pitches.
Cold war Mexico
- As the second world war gave way to the cold war, Latin American countries (often with US financial assistance) promoted urbanisation, industrialisation, infrastructural expansion, population growth and transnational economic integration.
- Between 1950 and 1970, Mexico’s one-party state invested massively in public services and industrial and agricultural development.
- But they helped connect the poppy fields of Durango to the rest of northern Mexico and the US border too.
The ‘heroin highway’
- It consolidated Durango’s importance as a Mexican drug-production centre and transformed Chicago into the biggest heroin-trafficking hub on the continent.
- The cash that trafficking organisations earned wholesaling heroin in the US was reinvested locally in everything from cattle ranches to construction companies and even an airline.
- Instead, these were completely intertwined with the economic growth, infrastructure development and mass migration that characterised the Mexican miracle.
- The story of the modern US–Mexican drug trade is not just about brutal violence and lives cut tragically short.
Nathaniel Morris received part of the funding for this research from the Leverlhulme Trust. He is affiliated with the Mexico & Central America Program of Noria Research.