El Narco Read Online Free PDF

by American troops ( los ninos héroes ), and politicians routinely bark about the imperial monster to the north. Meanwhile, the vast wave of Mexican migration to the United States is referred to as la reconquista —the reconquest. Many Texans or Arizonans, on the other hand, are bitterly incensed at accusations they stole the mammoth chunk of turf. The few inhabitants of the acquired territories, they argue, were liberated by the green-capped soldiers (at whom Mexicans are said to have shouted “Green, go”—the origin of the word gringo ).
    A 2009 billboard ad by Swedish vodka brewer Absolut illustrated how these wounds are still sore. Behind the slogan IN AN ABSOLUT WORLD, the ad showed an imaginary map in which a giant Mexico stretches close to the Canadian border and dwarfs the United States. The ad helped sell liquor and got some chuckles in Mexico. But Americans were so angry they bombarded the vodka brewer with thousands of complaints until Absolut withdrew the ad and apologized for causing offense. These attitudes all have a profound effect on the Mexican Drug War—and the knee-deep role of the United States.
    Following loss of territory and pride, Mexico plunged into more civil strife and disorder—until dictator Porfirio Díaz took its reins. A muleteer of Mixtec origins, Don Porfirio was a war hero against the Americans and the French, before ruling Mexico with a big stick from 1876 to 1911. His domination of power was not all about force. He found an effective formula to control the wild Mexican beast—a network of local chieftains, or caciques , who all got their piece of the pie. But if anyone dared to defy his rule, Don Porfirio would smash back with brutality. Up in the Sierra Madre, this meant rivers of blood. The Yaqui tribe refused to give up their ancestral lands to make way for sprawling plantations. Díaz unleashed manhunts, transporting prisoners in chains to tobacco plantations in Mexico’s swampy south. Most died from disease and inhumane conditions.
    But amid heightened security, the dictator oversaw rapid industrialization and mass agriculture. In Sinaloa, Díaz’s rich friends developed profitable plantations, while American and British companies built railroads and dynamited mine shafts. Industrialization brought Sinaloa into the international grid, beckoning steamers from across the globe. The plantations also swallowed the plots of small farmers, unleashing an army of landless peasants hungry for opportunity. The territory was ripe for trafficking. Now all Sinaloan bandits needed was a product. And in the reign of Don Porfirio, pretty pink opium poppies were first brought to the Sinaloan highlands.
    A century after Porfirio, I stare at Matilde’s poppies, which grow between surreal-shaped cacti that sprout out of the ground like tentacles. Stepping closer, I feel the petals are as soft as velvet and release a sweet aroma like an English garden on a spring morning. Such a pretty plant, yet the source of so much pain. Covering the fury of the drug war—the thousands of killings, beheadings, piles of seized dollar bills, the foreign aid, changing maps of cartel territory, and streams of refugees—we lose sight of the root of this whole conflict. It all starts with a simple flower on a hill.
    The opium poppy, Papaver somniferum , is a flower with particularly potent properties. It contains one of the oldest drugs known to man, a substance that has been called “magical” and “godly,” as well as “poisonous” and “evil.” The plant’s medicine is released when you scrape the buds with a knife, releasing a light brown mud. On the Sinaloan hills, they call it gum, and the people who scrape it are called gummers or, in Spanish, gomeros. Only a tiny amount of mud is released from each plant. Sinaloan gummers take a two-and-half-acre field with tens of thousands of poppies and harvest them to get just ten kilos of pure opium. I look at such a bag that has been seized by soldiers.