A. Nacaveva, Diario de un Narcotraficante

Diario de un Narcotraficante is one of the most important Mexican novels of the second half of the twentieth century. Written by an anonymous provincial journalist, first released in 1967 to almost complete popular silence and intellectual disdain, the book follows the travails of a gang of small-scale heroin traffickers in Culiacán over a year in the late 1950s. The action is sparse; the writing relatively uninspired; and long sections are spent on the excitement-free activities of waiting around and drinking. Narcos: Mexico it is not. Yet what the book lacks in style or even literary merit, it more than makes up for in social insight and historical and cultural import.

At the most basic level, Diario is the first work of narcoculture. No doubt, there had been rebel songs, smuggler songs and even drug songs before. There had even been songs written in honor of dead traffickers. (El Pablote – written for Ciudad Juárez smuggler, Pablo González, was first recorded in 1931). But narcoculture – at least initially - was a historically specific phenomenon. A compendium of words, songs, stories, and beliefs, narcoculture described a particular subculture of drug trafficking, which emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It focused on the narcotraficantes, the intermediaries who – like Nacaveva - bought up the opium gum, processed it into heroin, and then sold it on to those with contacts in the United States. It emerged in the Sinaloa capital of Culiacán but soon spread to other drug processing centers like Durango, Hermosillo, Nogales, and Guadalajara. And it told a more nuanced version of the drug trade than the official government propaganda. First developed as a group of oral testimonies and stories that passed around the bars of Culiacán and the neighborhoods of Tierra Blanca this version humanized the narcotraficantes, explained their motivations, outlined their hopes and dreams, and gave them meaning. 

No doubt, over the years, narcoculture has changed. It has been packaged, commodified, and sold to changing audiences. It has been infused with a rural nostalgia and flogged to migrant farm workers. It has been overlaid with a fetishistic violence and sold as crude propaganda. In contrast, Diario presents narcoculture pre-commodification. It is a work of what Claude Levi Strauss might term “raw narcoculture” as opposed to the “cooked narcoculture” of today. Set in the late 1950s, but probably written down in the early 1960s, it captures a particularly interesting moment in the history of the Mexican drug trade.

Chinese immigrants first brought the practice of growing opium poppies to Mexico in the 1910s. They processed small amounts of the harvested gum into smoking opium and sold it to Chinese communities around the farmlands of Mexicali or the mines of Cananea. During the late 1920s, Mexican politicians – particularly in Sinaloa and Sonora - harnessed anti-Chinese racism to growing economic nationalism and used it to force thousands of Chinese immigrants into exile. Between 1926 and 1940 Mexico’s Chinese population dropped from over 24,000 to less than 5000. Nevertheless, the practice of growing opium poppies, harvesting the gum and transforming it into narcotics remained. By the late 1930s, growing global conflicts had started to cut U.S. opiate addicts off from their usual sources. And by the early 1940s, the Mexican opium producers had taken their place.

Between 1940 and 1947, Mexico’s drug industry experienced a veritable boom. For nearly a decade Mexico produced nearly all America’s opiates. The business fed existing addicts as well as the increasing numbers of American servicemen who returned from the war addicted to the pain relief of morphine. (It was something Arturo had noticed. “There are a lot of users who got the habit in the war; they were wounded and doctors prescribed it to relieve pains and once they got the habit, they used it for vice.”)

Particularly in Sinaloa, the drug industry was surprisingly open. Peasants grew poppy plants in the fields beside their houses or in village squares; they stored the gum in in big milk churns, and they brought it down for sale on the back of donkeys. In the city, the local elites got rich investing in big loads or lending money to high-profile traffickers. So did the state government, which started quite brazenly to tax the incipient industry in return for putting U.S. Customs agents, federal policemen and soldiers off the scent.

Examples of this early permissiveness are legion. Some are darkly comic. In July 1946, for example, Paulino Mendívil Salomón, a laborer from the Chihuahua highlands, wandered into the police station in Culiacán. He was angry and was there to make a complaint. He had come down to the city to sell 10 kilos of raw opium. But as he was about to make a deal, he was accosted by a cop. The cop waved a pistol at him, grabbed the gum and ran off. After Mendívil finished his statement, he was surprised that the police arrested him. His crime: being by his own admission a drug trafficker. It was a felony that up to that point he didn’t know existed.

Others are just shocking, even for those inured to tales of corruption. In August 1947 Mexico City journalist – Danton de los Rios - visited Culiacán. He was on a mission to expose the collusion between the state authorities and the local drug traffickers. It was not very difficult. He walked in the front door of the governor’s palace, approached the governor’s secretary, explained that he needed money fast, and was promptly offered 50 kilos of raw opium and two kilos of heroin.

But starting in 1947 this era of public permissiveness ended. First U.S. drug tsar, Harry Anslinger, put public pressure on the Mexican authorities to clamp down on the industry. Then President Miguel Alemán capitulated. He tightened up Mexico’s drug laws, placed drug policing in control of the Policia Judicial Federal (PJF) and initiated the so-called Gran Campaña. This was an annual military campaign, designed to eradicate poppy growing and arrest poppy farmers. In the first year alone, soldiers rounded up over 3000 peasants.

In response, the Mexican drug trade went underground. And it changed. Profitable, regional industry met Mexico’s gangland. Sinaloa slang met underworld calo. Cooperative networks of friends and family members met bordertown professional smugglers. And the negotiated ecosystem of backhanders and payoffs met the unrelenting pressure of U.S. and Mexican drug agents. It is this subculture, this new, covert world of the narcotraficante that the Diario uncovers and describes. It is also this small, localized subculture that would swell with the onset of the 1960s counterculture drug market and harden with the unforgiving counternarcotics campaigns of the 1970s to produce what we now recognize as narcoculture.

Nacaveva was a pseudonym. The real author of Diario was a Culiacán journalist, who wrote for various local newspapers. His job offered him access and we know that before writing the book he interviewed various narcotraficantes, including the Badiraguato chemist, Manuel Plascencia and the Tierra Blanca kingpin, Eduardo “Lalo” Fernández. These narcotraficantes told him the stories that form the backdrop to Diario. They raise the work from a substandard crime thriller to a genuinely engaging piece of underworld social realism, the Mexican, producer-focused, mirror to slum poet Nelson Algren’s contemporaneous addict tale, The Man with the Golden Arm.

In fact, these backdrops are so realistic (and the narrative by contrast so slow) that the book often appears more like a meditation on trafficker life than a novel. Furthermore, the characters, the places, the relationships, the attitudes and the culture surrounding the trade are often so spot on that they often seem pulled directly from the pages of newspapers and court records.  

For example, the principal characters that form Nacaveva’s gang have strong parallels in real life. Arturo, the boozy but socially responsible lawyer, with a strong aversion to violence is like any number of elite and middle-class Sinaloans, who flirted with the trade in the 1940s and 1950s. For these traffickers, like Arturo, the drug trade was part adrenaline-fueled hobby, part quick capital injection. And just like Arturo, they moved swiftly in and out of the business depending on a measured assessment of risk and reward.

Chinese opium merchants pioneered this sporadic and business-oriented involvement in the trade. Perhaps the first was the Mexicali entrepreneur, Wong Fook Yee. Fook was born in Canton in 1866. He arrived in Mexico in his forties and settled in Mexicali in 1913. The border city was the capital of Baja California; nearby U.S.-owned cotton farms had been trying to attract Chinese laborers for nearly a decade; and by 1910 it had the largest Chinese population in Mexico. Whether through work, inheritance, or loans, Fook came to Mexicali already a rich man. The year he arrived he set up a company with a capital of 60,000 pesos. Initially he invested in property, buying up over an acre of prime real estate.

But Fook also allied with a couple of opium dealers – Lem Kem Tock and Quong Wing - to build up his capital. He rented them a couple of buildings. They then converted them into smoking dens. The combination of land and leisure brought rewards and by 1917, he owned most of Mexicali’s Chinatown and paid nearly a fifth of the city’s property taxes. His partner Quong Wing had also done very well and now owned the Grand Hotel Peninsular, four bars, a billiard hall, a restaurant and a general store. By the end of the decade all three were out of the business. It had become too hot. Fook, in particular, had acquired considerable power and respect. He became the de facto head of the city’s Chinese community and worked with officials and U.S. cotton farmers to attract more Chinese settlers. Short term dabbling in the opium business had paid off.

If Fook was the first, other Chinese businessmen played a similar game. There was Antonio Wong Yin, the Torreon entrepreneur who mixed opium wholesaling with wholesaling groceries, liquor sales, and bar owning. And there was the small group of Chinese businessmen who clung onto their properties and their business interests in the Sinaloa coastal town of Los Mochis. In 1947, a Chinese American agent visited the group to investigate their strategies. He discovered that despite the big U.S. demand, the Chinese gang were sitting back. Over the past three years, they had made extensive profits which (like Arturo in Diario) they didn’t want to risk by taking processed opium up to an increasingly well-policed U.S. border.

If the Chinese opium merchants pioneered this approach, Sinaloa businessmen soon copied them. Perhaps the most high-profile of these real-life Arturos was Roberto Dominguez Macias. From his arrival in Sinaloa in 1941 to his eventual arrest in 1952, Dominguez dominaDOminted the local opium wholesale business. He started off small-scale, working with the surviving Chinese emigré, Luis Ley in a farm just outside Culiacán. Dominguez had the money and owned the land; Ley brought the tech; he grew the poppies and harvested the gum.

But he soon moved up. As early as 1943 he was described as the “principal purchaser” in what was already a “soundly established business”. Though he lived in an upscale house in Culiacán, he did most of his buying around the station at Guamuchil, using a local shopkeeper and a Chinese hotelier as intermediaries. He then shipped the raw opium north by train hidden in sesame cakes, or preferably, to disguise the smell, guano. The scheme involved serious quantities; around 600 kilos according to one report.

Three years later, he had changed strategy yet again. He was now buying gum from beyond the Sinaloa mountains up into Durango and Sonora. The guano cover had gone and he was hiding the product under crates of tomatoes, which he sent by truck up to Nogales. Here he had a contact in the tomato wholesaling business, who helped him move the drugs into the United States. The scale had increased. A visiting journalist claimed that he was now famous in the region as “the only trafficker who bought drugs by the ton”. In just two years, he had transported a total of five tons to the United States. If true, it would have been worth over $8 million dollars.

The following year he aimed even higher, attempting to fund the region’s first large-scale heroin ring. He brought together the intermediaries from Badiraguato as well as some from farther afield in Durango and Chihuahua. It was their job to round up the year’s opium harvest and deliver it to a laboratory in Culiacán. Here he had a chemist, who was going to convert the opium to heroin. He had also assembled a group of Tijuana smugglers who were going to transport the finished product over the border.

Yet despite Dominguez’s drug activities, he still projected the aura of a respectable businessman.  A New Yorker who met him at the end of the decade described him as a forty-five-year-old man of average height and weight. He dressed smartly in U.S. suits and spoke English well. Though he went everywhere with two bodyguards, he was never seen with known traffickers or openly mentioned narcotics. He presented himself as a hotelier and entrepreneur who wanted to get into the shrimp fishing business.

Furthermore, it was not all front. Dominguez continued to invest in all sorts of other ventures as well as narcotics. He purchased four hotels in Culiacán including the upscale Hotel El Mayo in the center of town. Being known as an opium trafficker seemed to have no effect on his social standing. Though beery locals occasionally shouted “gomero, gomero” at his employees, the elites were more “enlightened”. Sudden wealth was social and commercial rocket fuel. They lent him money at generous rates; they joined him in glitzy tourism projects; they invited him to join the Chamber of Commerce; and they toasted him at the fancy balls. He even partnered with other “proper” businessmen like Ramón Bohn, a respected hotelier and an import-export entrepreneur. Rumors held that Bohn was the frontman for the guano.

Dominguez set a pattern for many of the Sinaloa elite. And over the next few decades many wealthy locals would accumulate capital with brief speculation in the opium trade. Some were farmers, who secretly supplemented their returns from chickpeas and tomatoes. “Que curioso, yo sembre lo mismo que mi vecino, coseche lo mismo y vendi lo mismo. Y yo estoy quebrado y este cabron esta millonario,” one farmer told the Sinaloa attorney general, Manuel Lazcano. Others were merchants, like Jorge Favela Escabosa, who ran a popular and fashionable centrica boneteria before teaming up with the Mocorito agricultural wholesaler and property magnate, José María Cazares to get involved in the narcotics trade.

If Arturo – the middle class opium smuggler – was a recognizable type, so were the other characters. Leandro, the narcotics boss “que se dedica a todo lo chueco” and has one foot in the Culiacán opium business and another in cross-border smuggling could have been any of a dozen suspects. Exchanging heroin for stolen U.S. vehicles was a popular criminal strategy. The jobs took similar contacts in the U.S. underworld. And if you could bribe a Mexican Customs official to give you the correct import papers, you were unlikely to get caught. A new car, with titles, would fetch as much as $1200 or six cans of opium. In fact, getting drug profits in the form of stolen cars probably doubled earnings back in Mexico. As a result, by 1950, the FBN reported that drug addicts were stealing cars in Los Angeles, driving them over the border where they sold either for cash or heroin. Many were then driven south to the ports of Santa Rosalia or La Paz where they were transported over to buyers in Sinaloa or Sonora.

 The most prominent of these Sinaloa-born borderlands bosses – at least in the 1950s - was probably Telesforo Parra López. He was born in a small ranch outside Choix in northern Sinaloa around the turn of the century. He started out his career as a sugar worker, before using stolen sugar cooperative funds to buy up opium from family members in Mocorito. Fleeing prosecution, he moved up to Tijuana where he teamed up with a group of Mexican-American car thieves from East Los Angeles. In 1953 the U.S. authorities arrested the head of the thieves, Frank H. Tellez. The subsequent trial contains heavy racial overtones as the prosecutors described how a group of “Pachuco” criminals led by Parra López, a Mexican “kingpin heroin peddler” had coerced a group of suburban white kids of both sexes into stealing cars and taking heroin. 

If Nacaveva’s characters ring true so does his understanding of the organization of the trade. The gang is not some hierarchically organized criminal organization. It is no proto-cartel. Instead, it is a loose network of friends and acquaintances. There is no plan, no grand strategy, no end game. The gang – if it could even be called that - is little more than a group of barflies and acquaintances who each specialize in a particular aspect of the trade. El Chuntero is the intermediary who brings the opium down from the Sierra; Don Antonio is the old rural cacique who collects it from the peasants; Arturo is the chemist who converts it into heroin. Pito is the arms dealer and smuggler who takes it to the border; Ismael, the cantina owner is the eyes and ears of the gang and the contact with the broader underworld. But specialisms can be learned and arrangements are made on the spot and by chance. When the intermediary fails to deliver the opium, they just go up to the Sierra themselves. And when the arms dealer doesn’t turn up Nacaveva decides to brave the border.  

In the first half century of the drug trade, these networks were the basic building blocks of the trade. (Even now, Anabel Hernández’s El Traidor suggests that these relatively ad hoc alliances born of friendship and family remain important). Most of the time, we can only get a glimpse at the very lowest rungs of such organizations when peasants or mules are captured. But occasionally U.S. and Mexican police forces worked together to uncover them.

In March 1947, for example PJF agents in Culiacán intercepted a letter between 25-year-old, local building contractor, Alfonso Gutierrez Benitez and 36-year-old Mocorito-born irrigation engineer, Gustavo Cañedo Aviles. The letter, written in Mexicali, explained that Gutierrez and another man called “Ramiro” had decided to send the “maize” up to San Francisco. They were to receive payment, partly in cash, and partly in the form of a Mercury 8 Convertible, which they would send down to Cañedo to either keep or sell. Maize, it transpired, was the code for opium. Cañedo, the wealthy engineer (or the Arturo in this network) sourced the gum in Culiacán. He handed it to Gutierrez (the Pito of the gang), who would take it to the border. Gutierrez would then hand it over to Ramiro, who would sell it for money and stolen U.S. cars. Cañedo would then sell the cars on to his brother, who ran a second-hand car shop.

The mysterious Ramiro, it seems, was José Ramiro Sánchez Cazares. And less than six months later FBN agents in Los Angeles would uncover another node of the network. Ramiro was the Leandro of the organization, a smuggler and fence of stolen cars, who worked not only with Cañedo and Gutierrez but also with other suppliers. In November 1948 the agents bugged a Hollywood hotel suite and overheard Ramiro talking to one of these other suppliers. The other supplier was Francisco Lavat Varestegui, an employee of the Mexican Department of Civil Aeronautics. Lavat had learned to process opium into heroin from a Swiss chemist in the early 1940s. He now ran a small laboratory in Hermosillo. He used an airline pilot to take the heroin from Hermosillo up to Nogales. Then the airplane pilot’s American brother-in-law would take it to Los Angeles or San Francisco. Here it was either paid for with cash, with cars, or increasingly with guns and ammunition. Lavat would sell these to his cousin, who also happened to be head of the Mexican Department of Civil Aeronautics. Again, just like in Diario, the network was a blend of jobbing amateurs and organized criminals linked by friendship and family.

If Nacaveva captures the traffickers, their organizations and their methods, he also focuses in on the narcotics police on both sides of the border. Both groups are portrayed as brutal and corrupt.

In the United States, FBI agents torture him using a cattle prod, steal his money, and then hand him over to the PJF. The PJF also threaten, beaten and electrocute until he signs a confession. When he complains about this to the Agente del Ministerio Público, the official simply tells the police “Make him sign his declaration and take him away…. I can’t be wasting my time.”

The scenes in the police cells make difficult reading. And one might be tempted to think they are exaggerations – nightmare stories repeated by traffickers to justify their actions and warn competitors off the trade. Yet again, however, Nacaveva’s descriptions parallel real-life cases so closely that it is difficult to believe he didn’t draw from them directly. In 1956, for example, we know that Tijuana PJF agents raided the house of the Badiraguato-born trafficker Fidel Carrillo Elenes. They caught Carillo, his son Fidel Carrillo Caro, and his nephew, a young Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseca Carrillo. They brought them to the cells, beat them “all over their body and in partes nobles”.  Witnesses heard them screaming in pain. Carrillo Jr. and Fonseca were released. But Carrillo Sr was forced to sign a confession and given four years prison time. (For those interested in narco-coincidences, it seems that the lead PJF agent was a J. Paniagua. J. García Paniagua was head of the DFS in 1978, who allegedly invited Sinaloa traffickers like Don Neto to form the “Guadalajara cartel”.)

Nacaveva’s descriptions of police practices are also of historical import. They suggest that U.S. and Mexican agents were employing beatings, electrocution (with the cattle prod or “chirris mirris”) and near drowning (through immersion in a tub of water) over a decade before President Nixon’s war on drugs. The harsh counter-narcotics measures of the 1970s, it seems, were nothing new.

Nacaveva’s social study also extends to his descriptions of the spaces and the geography associated with the trade. There is Tierra Blanca, the northern suburb of Culiacán where many immigrants from Badiraguato settled. There are the Culiacán bars and cabarets like La Quinta Rosa where the gang hang out, make deals, and drink. And there is the dingy Nogales cabaret, La Caverna, where Nacaveva hears Pedro Infante sing and which must be based on the town’s legendary La Roca restaurant.

Like many observers, Nacaveva also highlights the importance of the Rafael Buelna market. It is the site of boss Leandro’s lair and where the gang occasionally visits on the look-out for opium. Lying just east of the city center and on the road out to the Sierra, it was the arrival point for many highland peasants. They would bring down their goods first on the back of mule trains and then – by the 1940s – piled on the top of rickety trolley cars. These goods inevitably included opium. The Sinaloa author, Leonides Alfaro remembers hundreds of peasants carrying butter churns full of goma from the hills to the market where they would exchange their produce for “clothes, halters for animals, ploughs, and money”.[1] So did the Sierra peasant, Teresa Leyva.

“Yo recuerdo que, por aquellos años, en los cincuenta, la gente llevaba la goma en los tranvías pa’ Culiacán tanto en el mercadito “Rafael Buelna” como el de Tierra Blanca, en unas latas mantequeras con unas pelotas negras, eso era la goma, que era hasta visto como algo normal”

And the Sinaloa cronista, Herberto Sinagawa, remarked that for this reason many of the early traffickers (like Leandro) set up their homes and businesses nearby.

“En el “mercadito”, como se le conoce coloquialmente, había una ter-minal de tranvías que iban a la sierra, con lo que este espacio se volvió punto de conexión entre ambas orografías. Muchos narcotraficantes que construyeron casa en la ciudad de Culiacán venían del lado de la sierra de Topia o de Canelas, Durango y se instalaban al oriente de la capital sinaloense.”

(In fact, the Mocorito-born irrigation engineer and opium trafficker, Gustavo Cañedo Aviles, lived just 3 blocks north of the place.)

Beyond these rather obvious places, Nacaveva also makes a short trip down to Guadalajara. This is the base for El Mocho and a rival gang of traffickers. Again, the story is rooted in real life. During the 1940s the capital of Jalisco became an alternative center of Mexico’s fledgling opium industry. As early as 1943, one U.S. agent described tracking a couple of mules on the train down from Culiacán to Guadalajara. They were carrying 2 kilos of smoking opium and another 6 kilos of crude opium. As soon as they arrived, they went directly to the Hotel Washington, which was owned by a Chinese-Mexican businessman from Los Mochis. This acted, the agent remarked, as “the clearing house for opium traffickers in Guadalajara”. It was the city’s Rafael Buelna market, but with beds and room service.

Within a few years, some of the more entrepreneurial traffickers had also set up their own heroin laboratories in the city. They formed similar networks to those in Culiacán. In 1947 PJF agents broke up one such network led by a former police official, Gastón Baca Corrella. He bought the opium in Sinaloa, took it to Guadalajara where he had political protection, and then employed a Spanish chemist and his Mexican wife to make the gum into heroin. They set up their laboratory just south of the center in Calle Venezuela. The heroin was then, allegedly, sold on to a representative of the U.S. mafia, who was also based on the city called Max Cossman. 

If the details give the book authenticity, it is Nacaveva’s description of the everyday culture of the traffickers which make the book such a fascinating read. Three particular aspects of the culture stand out. The first is the waiting. As Nacaveva repeatedly reminds us, most of the traffickers’ time is spent waiting – waiting for the opium to arrive from the Sierra, waiting for Pito to arrive from the border, waiting for Pito to arrive back from the border, waiting at the border for a contact when Pito doesn’t arrive. Such an observation finds its echo in pretty much every trafficker memoir. For 1970s cocaine smuggler Robert Sabbag “smuggling is waiting. Sitting in rooms. Waiting. Killing time.” For Nacaveva the trafficking life is “pura vagancia”.  

Sabbag killed this time drinking and watching TV. Nacaveva’s gang spend it drinking and practicing their pistol skills. In fact, Nacaveva’s drinking is so constant and so prolific that the first half of the book reads like some kind of alcoholic’s confession. Arturo and Nacaveva start their odyssey drinking Carta Blanca in Ismael’s cantina on Avendia Aranjuez; they play the card game, Chingona; then they move on to the “cabaret de segunda, un prostibulo” called La Quinta Rosa. Over the next year, drinking seems to take up most of their time. They rack up vast bar tabs – 300 pesos in one elongated borrachera. They only take a break when they are busy stirring the opium and making it into heroin. There is clearly an irony here, and Nacaveva knows it. U.S. heroin addiction is effectively paying for Mexican alcoholism. It is the vice industry’s closed circle. But there is also more to the drinking. Drinking everyday with the gang members breeds familiarity, trust and friendship. It solidifies the links on which the trade is run. Though it is initially fun, it soon turns as Nacaveva remarks into a “duty”.

The other principal pastime is pistol marksmanship. When Nacaveva and the gang are not drinking they are wandering into the hills outside Culiacán to practice their shooting. They shoot cans and bottles and compete with one another over accuracy. Guns are leisure equipment first and tools of the trade second. Such observations shed light on the connection not only between guns and the drug trade, but also between guns and mid-century Mexican culture more generally. Americans – we know – have fetishized guns for centuries. They have always linked gunplay to masculine honour. And there is nothing more iconic than the sheriff quick drawing his six-shooter and putting down the baddie.

But what Nacaveva demonstrates is that there is a similar obsession in Mexico. Gunplay makes a man and has done since at least the Mexican Revolution.  It is the reason most politicians would arrive in Congress armed during the 1930s. It is the reason for the proliferation of Mexican hunting and shooting clubs during the 1940s and 1950s. It is the reason, as Pablo Picatto demonstrates, why pistoleros became such an integral part of mid-century political culture. It is the reason why the iconic photographs of Pancho Villa show him with bullet straps and a pair of Colt Bisleys. And it is the reason that every civilian Mexican president from Miguel Alemán onwards has posed for photographers holding a gun.

In fact, this gun culture seems to have been particularly prevalent in Sinaloa. During the 1910s highland revolutionaries competed with their skills with a Winchester rifle. There were members of the famed Carabineros de Santiago who claimed to have shot two rabbits with a single shot. The following decade, local elites turned to hunting and shooting as a leisure activity. (In fact, it was on one of these hunting expeditions in 1923 that the resident Culiacán health official discovered one of the state’s first big poppy plantations). And by the late 1930s conflicts over land had pushed sharp-shooting pistoleros to the fore. They were employed by both peasants and landowners to take out rivals. Adverts in local newspapers reveal that merchants like Robert Mejia, Aurelio Estevez and the Cia Mercantile Engum did a brisk trade in guns and ammunition. Deaths by guns in Sinaloa – as a percentage of overall homicides – reached over 60 per cent (or similar to the present day). And, one of the first books on the subject of pistolerismo by roving journalist Mario Gill was focused on the state.

No doubt, contemporary narcoculture’s obsession both with high calibre weapons and engraved, gold-plated Colts has its own culture, causes and rhythms. As many journalists and scholars are starting to realize it was no coincidence that homicides in Mexico started to rise almost immediately after the United States cancelled its ban on high calibre weapons. But as Nacaveva’s work suggests, the booming gun market also fell on fertile ground south of the border.  

Beyond a love of guns, Diario also reveals other trafficker attitudes. Perhaps the most striking is the nationalism. When the FBI agents claim that “most people involved in the smuggling are Mexico. They are the ones that wage war against us the most,” Nacaveva quickly replies, “I don’t care if they are Chinese. We’re your neighbours. You guys have waged many wars on us, one way or another.” In another pained exchange Nacaveva screams “Don’t talk about my country… don’t bring my country into this”. It is an attitude also expressed by the opium growers. When Arturo explains that the drugs go north to addicts in the United States, they reply, “Well if it gives some earnings to us that are poor, it’s good”. 

Bringing nationalism into rough-and-tumble of the drug trade may seem strange or even overly romantic. But those involved in the trade have often viewed their work through the prism of nationalism. The United States had invaded their country, stolen their lands, extracted mineral and agricultural wealth, and now offered them pittance pay as braceros in return. All the drug trade did was balance out the scales. What was black tar heroin but traffickers’ contribution to the “hecho en México” campaign?  What were narcocorridos, with their tales of laughing at border security and evading gringo cops, but a subaltern counterpunch, a modern take on what historians term “peasant nationalism”. It was something that was occasionally reflected in the offhand comments of cornered traffickers as well as Nacaveva. During the Michoacán anti-narcotics operations of the early 1960s one local poppy planter rebuked the soldiers: “Tell me another way to take revenge for what happened in 1947 [the year the U.S. led a controversial nationwide livestock cull to wipe out foot-and-mouth disease] if it isn’t poisoning the gringos. Instead of putting me in jail, you should act like a good Mexican and give me better seeds”.

If nationalism seems to link the Mexican traffickers, what increasingly divides them are differing attitudes to violence. Some of the traffickers, especially those in danger of arrest (and torture) at the border, employ violence frequently. Leandro, the car thief and kingpin, is described as “un viejo muy asesino”. Pito, in contrast, “tiene grandes conceptos sobre su honradez y comportamiento y sobre todo la seriedad que trata los asuntos”. So does Arturo. He takes minimal risks, stays away from the border, and is outraged when he finds out that Nacaveva has got involved with hardened criminals. “Como te metes en lios? Que necesidad tienes de andar en eso?... Ese no se tentaba el corazón para matar o mandar a matar a alguin y de pilón se quemaba”.

The divisions, of course, are standard underworld thriller fare. Nacaveva is the Michael Corleone of the piece, the educated ingenue gradually pulled into a world of danger, brutality, and violence. But the divisions also point to a very specific moment in the history of Mexican drug production. Up until the late 1940s, the drug trade in Sinaloa was relatively pacific. Trafficker networks were linked by family, friendship and compadrazgo. Marriages, fiestas and drinking reinforced these bonds of trust. And violent competition between traffickers was almost unknown.

 In the early 1950s this changed. As U.S. and Mexican official clamped down on the trade and arrested, tortured or killed suspects, networks splintered and divided.  Conflicts between traffickers in Culiacán increased. Between 1950 and 1954 almost all the high profile traffickers – particularly from outside Sinaloa – were killed or arrested. Such was the violence Culiacán got the moniker “Chicago en huaraches”. In June 1951 it was the turn of José Mendez García, a migrant from Michoacán who had married into a Sinaloa family, and taken over the trade at the border. He was gunned down in a popular Culiacán restaurant. In March 1952 farmers found the burned corpse of his right-hand-man in shallow grave. The same year the authorities finally caught up with the mysterious Culiacán kingpin, Roberto Dominguez, and charged him with murdering one of his lawyers. Two years later, another border trafficker who had relocated to Guadalajara called Prisciliano “Chano” Cabrera, was also shot. So was the border car thief. José Ramiro Sánchez Cazares.

Again, these real-life conflicts provided the material for the tales of targeted assassinations and underworld funerals, which pepper the last section of the book. In fact, reading the FBN files on Cabrera and Sánchez Cazares, it is difficult to believe that Nacaveva didn’t just pull the story of the conflicts between the Guadalajara gang and Leandro’s Culiacán mob from real life. 

[1] “Interview with Leonides Alfaro”, Noroeste, 12 May 2008.