Mexico’s official history does not properly address the Drug Wars and its effect on the nation as well as the U.S. – Mexico border region, including criminal spillover between the two countries especially since 1911. Drawing from evidence gathered at Mexico’s National Archives – specifically declassified documents from Mexico’s secret police files – contemporary news accounts from Tijuana, Mexico City, and California, as well as court cases and long ignored political biographies, I trace the historical origins of the Drug Wars in Northern Mexico extending into Mexico City; a history of drugs, dissidence, and violence.

In my view, the problem of drugs in Mexico must be examined in Three Phases, two of which – Phase One and Two – I take up in the volume. The First Phase is from 1911-1945. The Second Phase is from 1945-1985. The Third Phase, since 1985, covers the rise of what I refer to as turf wars between competing drug trafficking organizations for the control of specific corridors vital for the production and distribution of drugs into the United States.

The First Phase goes back to the year 1911 when General and later Governor Esteban Cantú arrived to defend the Northern Territory of Baja California against incursions from Southern California by the Flores Magón brothers during the start of the Mexican Revolution. This was also a period where the role of vice tourism in Tijuana and Mexicali profited from the Prohibition Era in the United States (1920-1933) set the foundations for a drug trafficking model– developed for Baja Norte by Governor Cantú. This cross-border smuggling model was later refined in Baja under General and then Governor Abelardo L. Rodríguez (1921-1930), who then took the model to Mexico when he joined President Ortiz as a Secretary of Defense (1932) and Economy (1932) before he became Interim President of Mexico (1932-1934). The model has held to this day.

The Second Phase encompasses Mexico’s official start on the War on Drugs from 1945 to 1985 and coincides not surprisingly with the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s. In this Second Phase I analyze the consolidation and metamorphoses of Drug Trafficking Organizations in Mexico’s War on Drugs up to 1960. Thus, I explore the connection between East-Coast based Mafia and its incursion and eventual control of the drug trade and organized crime in the West Coast as well as eventually the transborder region. I also analyze the early eradication campaigns carried out by Mexican authorities first on their Baja regional level and subsequently at the national level. I also examine links between “Bugsy” Siegel and his alleged control of the drug trade in Southern California, which stretched easily to Tijuana.

This volume also investigates the War on Drugs and a “hidden dirty-war” against dissidence and peasants in rural Mexico, a span that ranged from 1965 to 1985. Under the pretext of eradicating drug production by narcocultivadores or narcogrowers, Mexican authorities also launched an offensive against dissident groups interested in readdressing the land issue in rural Mexico, effectively eradicating dissidence, but not drugs.

The search for the source of drugs soon involved the CIA-Contra-Drug Trafficking connection from the Mexican perspective. By the early 1980s, The Mexican journalist Manuel Buendía had begun to explore the link between the CIA-Contra-Drug Trafficking Conenction from the Mexican perspective, and he hypothesized that it needed the complicity of corrupt Mexican and law enforcement officials. In addition to his, Buendía also uncovered the participation of other state actors, such as the Mexico Secret Police (DFS) and the CIA. Buendía was murdered in 1984.

The drug issues came together in the 1985 abduction in Guadalajara and torture-murder of DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. To unwind this complicated issue, I analyze the official and unofficial versions about this major transnational crisis. The Third Phase in my analysis begins, then, with the grisly murder of “Kiki” by Drug Warriors, which threw down the gauntlet to the United States. The Mexican Government came under great pressure to take drastic action to help U.S. agents that had flocked to Mexico to find the killers.

In this volume I only offer a brief sketch of issues that need full research of this Third Phase since 1985. My on-going investigations call for a follow-up volume to cover the complex rise of full-scale “turf wars" between drug lords, and between the drug lords and the military/police. This research will lead us into President Calderón’s so-called “War on Drug Lords,” which in reality had already gotten underway.

In the Epilogue of this volume, I articulate questions that address both the recent and drug history of the region. The analysis I raise presents a deep historical analysis of Mexico up to 1985. It also provides a starting point for future scholarship to be placed in its proper historical context, thus utilizing my historical scholarship as developed in this work as a launching point in order to place Mexico’s long-standing major problem: Public Order and Safety, the disorder of which threatens the very being of what is called the “Mexican Nation System of Government.”

Peru's importance to the United States in the nineteenth century has been underappreciated because there were few instances of sharp conflict between the two nations. But, beginning with U.S. export of coarse cloth from new cotton mills just after Peruvian independence, continuing during the influence of Peruvian guano on U.S. "scientific agriculture," and then in the period of Peru's extraordinary effort to build trans-Andean railways, Peru exercised important influence on U.S. economy and imagination.

This work traces the relationship of both "developing nations" from their early engagement through Peru's "guano era," with an emphasis on why the United States pursued industrialization and Peru did not. Conventional wisdom holds that Peru lacked the requisite labor, capital and entrepreneurship required to become an industrial nation. Yet, preindustrial textile manufacturing was well established in Peru, and a country reaping large fortunes from guano in the nineteenth century could not be wanting in capital. Study of how relations with Peru were advantageous to U.S. development helps clarify some of Peru's nineteenth century development policy failures.

It is argued here that the cotton textile "revolution" was actually an evolution that Peru could have engaged in during the first decades of its independence. Peru possessed key factors (water power, high quality cotton, merchant capital, potential labor) and had a source of machinery in the United States. A U.S. ship captain was impressed with water-powered machinery he glimpsed in Lima in 1805 during a trip immortalized by Herman Melville in Benito Cerreno. But, the necessary "Hamiltonian" policies were defeated politically by elite groups, including those who exploited national sentiment to gain special commercial privileges as hijos del pa�s.

The social backgrounds of the first U.S. representatives, merchants and naval officers sent to Peru are contrasted as an introduction to early U.S. industrialization and its implications for Peru. The study's formal opening year, 1818, marked establishment of the U.S. navy's Pacific Station off the west coast of South America, a U.S. whaleship's discovery of the fabled "Peruvian grounds" and arrival of the first U.S. agent in Peru, Bartow Prevost. The future of the U.S.-Peruvian relationship was presaged in the years leading up to Peruvian independence by the U.S. navy's aggressive protection (over Prevost's objections) of U.S. merchants who defied the patriot blockade to resupply Spain's forces. U.S. naval captains also collected fees for moving U.S. and Spanish merchant capital out of the viceroyalty.

Following Peruvian independence in 1824, U.S. interests worked over the next decade to discourage Peru from following the very policies used to achieve development success in the United States. The guano bonanza that gave rise to the Peruvian oligarchy was largely squandered as a development vehicle because Peru's human capital was neglected and abused through forced labor. Evidence from the U.S. guano market demonstrates, contrary to conventional belief, that Peru underpriced its precious fertilizer.

To provide focus, this study examines the relationship to the United States of a subgroup within Peruvian elites, here termed the "Barreda social network," whose rise was based upon control of the U.S. guano market in the 1850s.

Throughout the period under study, misguided policy choices were driven by elite Peruvian racial contempt for labor and laboring classes (Indians, blacks and Chinese), something scholars have minimized when accepting elite claims that the country was plagued by a "labor shortage" throughout the nineteenth century.

Because they despised their country's Indian majority, Peruvian elites dreamed of attracting European immigrants and, in the meantime, made recourse to importation of Chinese bondsmen for their development projects and even conducted slave raids on Polynesia. White artisans tried to prevent blacks and Indians from competing in skilled trades. The man who tried to launch a Peruvian cotton textile industry with U.S.-made machinery felt obliged to promise he would only employ white workers.

At the same time, guano riches and foreign borrowing supported extravagant importing of U.S. and European manufactures, dampening stimulus to local production. U.S. goods were especially damaging because they most closely resembled those Peruvians could produce for themselves.

Frustrated by stagnation, in the late 1860s Peruvians embarked on a frantic program of railroad building to leverage the guano boom into something concrete before the bubble burst. Unfortunately, while impressive from an engineering and quality standpoint, the construction was conducted under the same cheap-labor and import-intensive policies that had discouraged manufacturing.

For the final years examined here, this study looks at the relationship between two much-mystified figures, railroad evangelist Manuel Pardo (the Barreda's political figure whose presidency ended in 1876), and U.S. railroad contractor Henry Meiggs (whose projects became paralyzed at the same time), showing how the latter carried to extreme the same import-intensive development approach favored by the Barredas. How Pardo and Meiggs brought the country to bankruptcy demonstrates the failure of Peru's nineteenth century development model.