The first crops of drugs in Michoacán date back to the 1950s, but “there are indications that their cultivation persisted in the 1960s and became widespread in the 1970s,” writes researcher Enrique Guerra Manzo. That changed. Now, says Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the DEA, the cartels produce drugs in laboratories that are more profitable for them.
Mexico City, November 9 (However).– Criminal groups in Michoacán are focusing more on synthetic drugs made from chemical precursors that arrive by sea, which can be made all year round, unlike drugs such as marijuana or poppies whose plants can be destroyed by forcing the drug trafficking organizations to wait until the next harvest, explained Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the DEA.
“These drugs are very easy to produce because they use a metal vat, they mix the chemical precursors with a shovel, a stick, and it is easy to introduce them into the United States mainly through the border checkpoints between Mexico and the United States,” Vigil explained in an interview with However.
This transition has become evident in Michoacán, where the presence of drug trafficking, which dates back to the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, arose from the cultivation of marijuana and poppies that farmers were forced to do due to the economic crisis that brought with it the fall in lemon and melon prices, as well as the gradual withdrawal of state support, which “coerced the people of the region to subsidize their losses by cultivating drugs, especially all marijuana,” explains researcher Enrique Guerra Manzo, in his book Violent territories in Mexico, published by the UAM and Editorial Terracota.
In the same text, the academic explains that the first evidence of the planting of drugs in Tierra Caliente, in Michoacán, dates back to the 1950s, but “there are indications that their cultivation persists in the 1960s and becomes widespread in the 1970s, a time when trafficking groups openly confront the army and the judicial police; it is also in these years that the problem attracts the attention of the local and national press.”
A document from the Secretariat of National Defense, recovered by Enrique Guerra in the General Archive of the Nation, gives an account of how an anonymous resident of Tepalcatepec wrote to the Secretary General Hermenegildo Cuenca Díaz in August 1972, in the Government of Luis Echeverría Álvarez:
“To the four winds they do not sow anything else [que] pure drug […] We all need money”, but it was “unfair” that some were allowed to plant “drugs” and others were not: “if it is not prohibited, tell us all to sow it and if it is prohibited, send a batch [militar …] and a boss who doesn’t sell himself […] so that the defenses accompany him [rurales] here there is
many criminals [sic] “They are the ones who plant it and are fooling themselves by buying from us and then confronting the Government.”
Two years later, in 1974, the Attorney General’s Office maintained that Michoacán was one of the states “where the most marijuana is produced and where more arrests have occurred than in other parts of the country,” according to a report by The Universal from that time.
Everything changed a decade later, in 1985. On March 5 of that year, the body of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was found in a rural area of La Angostura, in Vista Hermosa, Michoacán. Although it would later be known that Camarena had been tortured to death. The leaders of the Guadalajara Cartel, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero, were identified as responsible. That moment meant the disintegration of the Guadalajara Cartel that would give rise to a second generation of cartels: that of Tijuana, Juárez and Sinaloa.
In the case of Michoacan, the evolution of the Gulf Cartel will be elemental, but particularly of its armed wing Los Zetas, made up of deserters from the Mexican Army trained in the United States. In fact, Edgar Guerra Manzo indicates that with the arrival of Los Zetas in Michoacán at the beginning of this century, “a cycle of terror and plundering of the population began that has not abated to date.”
“The business was no longer limited to narcotics (whose market expanded with the introduction of synthetic drugs), but extended to the exploitation of the entire territory (places), people and production chains (payment of fees). Michoacán was the laboratory of this model of plunder, which Los Zetas would later try to replicate in other entities. La Familia Michoacana and later Los Caballeros Templarios, perfected that model. They added certain doses of philanthropy (to emulate the “narcos of before”), with which they intended to socially shield themselves. They exercised growing territorial power through the plaza bosses in the more than seventy municipalities of the entity that they managed to control and, in the Templar, religious mystical phase, as the military operations against them intensified, their plundering side also ended up imposing itself,” the academic elaborates.
La Familia Michoacana emerged as a cartel in the 1990s as a result of an alliance with the Gulf Cartel to eliminate the La Familia Valencia organization, also known as the Millennium Cartel, a criminal group from which the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) emerged, whose leader is Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, who disputes control of Michoacán, where he is from.
The main organizations operating in Michoacán today have turned their narcotics business into synthetic drugs, including fentanyl, an opioid that has caused a pandemic of addictions and deaths in the United States and Canada.
The Jalisco Cartel, for example, is a transnational organization with a presence in almost all of Mexico, which traffics fentanyl to the United States. The group is dedicated to extortion, migrant smuggling, oil and mineral theft, and arms trafficking.
La Nueva Familia Michoacana is accused by the DEA of transporting, importing and distributing more than 36 metric tons of methamphetamine, 12 metric tons of Mexican heroin and 12 metric tons of cocaine per year in the United States from Mexico. While the United Cartels are accused by the European Union of manufacturing and distributing illegal drugs such as methamphetamine, fentanyl and cocaine.