"As long as America's seemingly insatiable appetite for imported psychoactive substances

persists, Mexico's close proximity to the United States market assures that the logic of narcocorruption will remain entrenched" in the country's political system.

The Political Economy of Narco-Corruption in Mexico

PETER ANDREAS
The corrupting influence of the illicit drug trade is widely perceived as an especially extreme
example of the weakness of the state in many developing countries. Although there is obviously
much truth in this view, the Mexican experience of recent years reveals a more complex and
negotiated relationship between the business of drugs and the business of policing drugs.
In his final state of the union speech on November 1, 1994, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari
declared that "Mexico has changed intensely." Although he lauded the "establishment of a new
relationship between the state and society" and Mexico's achievement of "an advantageous
position in the new international reality," Salinas failed to mention that part of these changes has
been Mexico's rising place in the illegal drug export business. Indeed, although the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)-the crowning achievement of the Salinas
administration-does not officially include them, drug exports are an integral part of Mexico's
comparative advantage in an expanding regional trade relationship.
While Mexico has long been enmeshed in the drug trade, its role has grown significantly in the
1990s. According to Eduardo Valle, who resigned as personal adviser to the Mexican attorney
general in May 1994, Mexico's leading drug traffickers have become "driving forces, pillars
even, of our economic growth." The United States State Department estimates that as much as 70
percent of the South American cocaine bound for the United States market enters through
Mexico; Mexico also supplies between 20 and 30 percent of the heroin consumed in the United
States, and up to 80 percent of the imported marijuana. (Of course, any official drug statistics
represent at best rough estimates.) In addition, Mexican traffickers now dominate much of the
American market for methamphetamines.

PETER ANDREAS is a guest scholar at the Center for United States-Mexican Studies at the
University of California at San Diego, and a Social Science Research Council-MacArthur
Foundation fellow on Peace and Security in a Changing World. He is the author, along with Eva
Bertram, Morris Blachman, and Kenneth Sharpe, of Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) believes that Mexico earns more
than $7 billion a year from the drug trade, while Mexico's prosecutor general's office calculates
that drug traffickers operating in Mexico accumulated revenues of about $30 billion in 1994. The
drug business is a significant employer: there are roughly 200,000 people earning a living
growing drug crops (the Mexican attorney general's office calculates that the figure may be as
high as 300,000). This number does not include the thousands of other jobs directly or indirectly
generated by the drug trade in areas such as transportation, security, banking, and
communications. This underground exit option has been especially important during a time of
falling wages and limited employment prospects in the formal economy.
Ironically, Mexico's prominence in the drug trade is partly an unintended by-product of United
States policy: American law enforcement pressure or cocaine shipments through the Caribbean
and south Florida in the 1980s helped make Mexico the primary transshipment point for
Colombian cocaine bound for the American market. While this expensive interdiction campaign
provided political rewards for United States officials eager to show progress in the anti-drug
effort, the effect of such Maginot Line-style enforcement strategy was to create incentives for
Colombian traffickers to shift to Mexican smuggling routes. Thus, while the percentage of
cocaine entering the American market from Mexico was negligible in the early 1980s, by the
early 1990s Mexico was the route of choice for the majority of Colombian cocaine shipments.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Bush and Clinton administrations conveniently downplayed the
profound consequences of this geographic shift for Mexico in order to assure the smooth
negotiation and passage of NAFTA.
As drug trafficking in Mexico has expanded in the past decade, so too has Mexican drug
enforcement. Partly in an effort to pacify its northern neighbor, Mexico tripled its federal antidrug budget between 1987 and 1989, and tripled it again in the 1990s. The growth of Mexico's
anti-drug program is particularly striking given that it has occurred during a time of deep cuts
in overall government spending: drug control stands out as one of the few areas where state
intervention in the economy is increasing. Drug control now domi nates the Mexican criminal
justice system, with the majority of the federal budget for the administration of justice devoted
to the effort. The "Mexican attorney general's office," notes Mexican scholar Maria Celia Toro,
"has basically become an ant-drug law enforcement agency."
President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado officially declared drug trafficking a national security
threat in early 1988. And this declaration was reinforced by the administration of Carlos
Salinas. President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon has gone even further, repeatedly declaring
that drug trafficking is the country's number one security threat. Given that invoking national
security is rare in Mexican political discourse, these calls mark a significant departure from the
past.
For Salinas, classifying drugs as a national security issue was both a rhetorical move to
improve relations with the United States and an attempt to provide the rationale for a
revitalized national security apparatus. Salinas created a national security council and a new
intelligence agency, set up a unit in the attorney general's office for drug enforcement, and
developed new anti-drug units in the federal judicial police. He also reinforced the anti-drug

role of the military, designating a new army staff section that focused on drug control. By the
late 1980s about one-third of the military's budget was devoted to the anti-drug effort, and
some 25,000 Mexican soldiers were involved in drug control operations compared with only
5,000 in the 1970s.
As a result of its anti-drug role, the military has become the "supreme authority, or in some
cases the only authority" in parts of some states, such as Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Jalisco, and
Guerrero, according to Mexico watcher Roderic Ai Camp. While the military has traditionally
concentrated on crop eradication, its anti-drug mission has significantly expanded in recent
years. "In the past, there was always a reluctance to allow the military to play a stronger role,"
notes one United States official. "But with the Zedillo administration, that mind-set has
dissolved." As a consequence, military ties between the United States and Mexico have
deepened in recent years through military assistance and training for anti-drug programs.
THE LOGIC OF NARCO-CORRUPTION
Increased Mexican drug enforcement has generated a growing number of arrests and seizures
and a rise in crop eradication levels (Mexico boasts that it destroys more illicit crops than any
country in the world). These measures of policy progress are highlighted in the annual political
ritual of the certification process, in which the United States determines whether Mexico and
other drug-exporting countries are fully cooperating with American anti-drug objectives. While
these "body count" statistics are politically necessary to maintain good relations with the
United States and avoid the stigma of being "decertified," the reality is that the drug trade has
not only survived but has thrived in the face of intensified Mexican drug control efforts. United
States and Mexican officials alike place much of the blame on the corrupting power of the drug
trade. Yet corruption is a two-way relationship: it reflects the influence of drug smuggling over
the state and the state's influence over drug smuggling-and greater drug control capacity has
arguably only deepened this influence. Corruption involves not only the penetration of the state
but also penetration by the state. Drug smugglers must purchase an essential service
monopolized by government officials: the non-enforcement of the law. Those in charge of
enforcement must be bribed because they cannot be entirely bullied or bypassed.
The extent of drug-related corruption in Mexico is revealed by the series of high-profile
murders and scandals in recent years (including the arrest of Racal Salinas, the brother of
Carlos Salinas) that have profoundly shaken the political system. The primary purpose here is
not to focus on the mystery and intrigue that necessarily surround these con troversial events
(the complex and often speculative details about who did what, when, and why), but rather to try
to make sense of the underlying logic of drug corruption. Perhaps more than any other state
regulatory activity, drug enforcement provides extraordinary incentives to use public authority
for private gain. And these incentives only increase under conditions of fiscal austerity, economic
uncertainty, and low wages.
At its core, drug corruption is a cost of doing business. While corruption in the form of bribes
and payoffs has long been a part of the relationship between business and the state, it plays a
more vital role in the case of drug smuggling because of the illicit nature of the activity. The
enormous profits from drug smuggling (inflated by the drug's criminalized status) provide the
financial means to corrupt. In the case of Mexico, a study by the Autonomous National

University in Mexico City has found that cocaine traffickers spend as much as $500 million a
year on bribery, which is more than double the annual budget of the Mexican attorney general's
office. (These calculations are derived from a widely used model that assumes $1,000 in payoffs
for each kilogram of smuggled cocaine.)
TAXING THE DRUG TRADE
A useful way to make sense of drug corruption is to view the act of corruption as the equivalent
of paying a tax. Levels of corruption-the tax rate-often depend on the intensity of the drug
enforcement effort. As enforcement increases, so does the drug smuggler's need to corrupt those
who are doing the enforcing (the tax collectors). As Gianluca Fiorentini and Sam Peltzman
suggest in their 1995 book The Economics of Organized Crime, the greater the deterrent effort,
"the more [it creates] incentives to invest in corruption and manipulation of the deterrence
agencies themselves." This general observation is certainly applicable to the Mexican drug
control experience. Even though increased drug enforcement capacity has failed to significantly
deter the drug trade, it has increased the capacity to tax the trade in the form of corruption.
Smugglers who pay the "corruption tax" are less pressured by "tax collectors" than those who do
not. One senior Mexican official described the process this way: "[Drug enforcement agents]
receive money from one group of traffickers and they cannot act against people from that group.
But they have their hands free to arrest people from other groups." This type of selective
enforcement allows officials to do their job-seizing drugs and arresting smugglers-while also
collecting taxes from the drug trade. This dynamic favors large, well connected smuggling
organizations. Those smugglers with the greatest resources and contacts can most afford the
corruption tax and pay it to the most appropriate tax collectors, while the smaller smuggling
entrepreneurs are treated as tax evaders. Not surprisingly, it is the small-time smugglers who are
most often "audited" and penalized.
Taxing the drug trade sometimes takes the form of seizing a drug shipment and then reselling all
or part of it. Thus, confiscated drugs often disappear while in custody. In such cases, those
charged with policing smuggling actually become smugglers themselves. This reflects the larger
difficulty in Mexico of distinguishing between the police and the criminals. An internal report
from the Interior Ministry estimates that by 1995 there were about 900 armed criminal bands in
the country-of which more than 50 percent were made up of current or former law enforcement
agents.
Police often double as drug enforcers and as drug-smuggling protectors. When Sinaloa drug cartel leader Hector "El Guerro" Palma was arrested by the military in June 1995, he was at the
home of the local police commander; the majority of the armed men protecting him were federal
judicial police. Subsequent investigations revealed that Palma had bought off the senior federal
judicial police commanders in Guadalajara with several $40 million payments.
The lucrative payoffs from the drug trade mean that there is intense competition within and
between law enforcement agencies-for example, between local and federal police, who
sometimes end up shooting at each other. Violent conflicts often erupt between police operating
as law enforcers and police operating as law breakers. In one incident on March 3, 1994,
members of the federal judicial police came under fire from the judicial police of Baja California
as they were attempting a drug bust.

There is also enormous competition within law enforcement agencies to be assigned to key posts
along major smuggling corridors. Eduardo Valle claims that while he was in office, the top
Mexican drug enforcement posts were auctioned off to the highest bidder. The price of a law
enforcement position, he said, depends on changes in drug smuggling routes: "In Coahuila, for
example, there are four or five entrances into the United States. If one crossing point is closed,
the price of the federal police chief's position in that area goes down because the post is
irrelevant, but the price of the police chief positions in other places goes up. This is openly
discussed inside the federal police."
The case of Mario Ruiz Massieu, Salinas's top anti-drug prosecutor between March and November 1994, provides a glimpse into how the system of drug corruption can be organized. During
his tenure in office, cocaine seizures plummeted. Federal prosecutors and police commanders
allegedly paid Ruiz Massieu as much as $1 million to be assigned to profitable posts along the
border and in other major drug areas. Officials regularly brought him suitcases with up to
$150,000 in kickbacks. One official familiar with Ruiz Massieu's operation described it as a
"franchising system." Ruiz Massieu apparently inherited rather than created this system of selling
lucrative posts and receiving large kickbacks.
Payoffs are made at each level of enforcement-the higher the position, the higher the payoff. For
example, a notebook recovered from the smuggling organization run by Juan Garcia Abrego
included this list of payoffs: $1 million to the national commander of Mexico's federal judicial
police; $500,000 to the forces' operations chief; $100,000 to federal police commander in the
city of Matamoros. Abrego's cousin, Francisco Perez, testified in a federal trial in Texas in 1994
that he had delivered $500,000 to Javier Coello, Mexico's deputy attorney general, between 1988
and 1991. Coello was eventually dismissed but never charged.
The particular shape and form of drug corruption in some ways mirrors the structure and character of the Mexican state. As Peter Lupsha argues, "because of the institutionalized authoritarian
clientelism and centralization built into the national dominance of the Institutional Revolutionary
Party or PRI, transnational groups like the Colombians must work with and through Mexican
organized crime groups who have corruptive and collusive support of national institutions... for
protection." 1
1 Peter Lupsha, "Transnational Narco-Corruption and Narco Investment: A Focus on Mexico,"
Transnational Organized Crime, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p.85.
2 See Peter Andreas, "U.S.-Mexico: Open Markets, Closed Border," Foreign Policy, Summer
1996.
3 Peter Lupsha, "Drug Lords and Narco-Corruption: The Players Change but the Game
Continues," in Alfred McCoy and Alan Block, eds., War on Drugs (Boulder, Colo.: Westview,
1992), p.182.
Violent conflicts often erupt between police operating as law enforcers and police operating as
law breakers.

In other words, Colombian traffickers must operate in Mexico on Mexican terms. In practice this
means that the Colombians have become increasingly reliant on their Mexican business partners,
who have the necessary political connections and long-established trafficking networks. Consequently, the power and wealth of Mexican traffickers has dramatically increased
in a relatively short period of time. Mexico's comparative advantage in the cocaine trade is based
on its access to the United States market-and such access has only grown as economic barriers
between Mexico and the United States have fallen.2 Mexican traffickers and their protectors
within the state apparatus collect a sizable fee from their Colombian counterparts for entry into
the North American free trade zone.
As more cocaine is shipped through Mexico to the United States market by way of legitimate
commercial channels, drug payoffs reach beyond law enforcement to other regulatory agencies.
The Mexican Office of Communication and Transportation, Lupsha notes in his article, "is as
critical to the evolution of the Cali cartel's drug transportation system as it is to NAFTA. Its
portfolio includes the administration of airports, seaports, highways, communications lines, and
the Federal Highway Police." Lupsha contends that "Cali's new transportation methodology. ..
requires commercial airports, business fronts, the use of ports, free trade zones, container facilities, trailer trucking firms, and railroads. In short, it requires access, information, official forms,
and seals that only an Office of Communication and Transportation can provide."
Drug corruption in Mexico thus reflects a paradox: the state's drug enforcement effort is undermined by the corrupting influence of the drug trade, yet the drug trade cannot survive without the
protection of compromised elements within the state. Lupsha goes so far as to argue that because
of the centralized authoritarian nature of the Mexican political system, drug traffickers must
operate con permiso (with permission). The trafficker must go beyond simply sharing drug
profits and is "expected to assist the police and the political system by providing grist for the
judicial mill, as well as public relations materials to give U.S. drug enforcers. Thus, the trafficker
could gain protection and warning information; the police could gain credit, praise, and
promotions; the political system gained campaign monies and control; and the U.S., statistics, to
justify a job well done."3
Lupsha notes that this clandestine relationship between law enforcers and law evaders is
unstable, given the frequent changes in government leadership, the transfer or promotion of key
officials, and the often violent competition between smuggling organizations over trafficking
routes. This instability is evident in the rise and demise of one of Mexico's leading traffickers,
Juan Garcia Abrego. Abrego's trafficking operations, which had flourished in the Salinas years,
lost high-level protection after President Zedillo entered office, and soon also lost market share
to competitors based in Tijuana and Juarez. Having fallen out of favor, Abrego became a hunted
fugitive. By the time he was arrested in early 1996 and extradited to the United States, his business was in shambles. Nevertheless, Abrego's capture was applauded by the United States and
Mexico as a sign of official resolve in the anti-drug campaign.
THE STATE RESPONSE
When drug corruption scandals have erupted in Mexico, the official response has been to fire or
transfer individual officers and at times even disband entire agencies and create new ones. A
report by the attorney general's office indicates that over 400 agents of the federal judicial police

(more than 10 percent of total personnel) were fired or suspended between mid-1992 and mid1995 on drug-related charges. On August 14, 1996, 737 federal law enforcement officers were
dismissed, including Horacio Brunt, the celebrated police commander who had captured Abrego.
An additional 270 employees of the attorney generals office were fired between December 1996
and August 1997. Such mass firings, however, only begin to dent the problem: in 1996, the
attorney general estimated that "70 to 80 percent" of the judicial police force was corrupt.
Moreover, many fired police officers have simply been rehired in other regions of the country
and hundreds of other officers have been reinstated after challenging their dismissals in court.
Although the Zedillo administration has demonstrated a new resolve, past patterns suggest a lack
of sustained high-level political commitment to confronting corruption. Salinas, for example,
appointed Enrique Alvarez del Castillo, who had been the governor of the state of Jalisco,
attorney general. Under his governorship the drug trade had thrived and traffickers had operated
with little to fear from the authorities. Salinas also tried to appoint Miguel Nazar Hurtado
Mexico City police intelligence chief-despite the fact that he had been indicted in 1982 by a
United States grand jury in San Diego on car theft and conspiracy charges.
Institutionalized corruption within Mexican law enforcement has generated growing pressures to
turn to the military to take on more drug control tasks. But while militarization is interpreted by
American officials as a sign of Mexico's heightened resolve to fight drug trafficking, a greater
military role in drug control (and thus proximity to drug smugglers) is also likely to generate
greater corruption in the military. In late 1991, in one of the most notorious cases of military
corruption, ten federal judicial police agents attempted to apprehend smugglers delivering 800
pounds of cocaine from a small airplane on a remote airstrip in the state of Veracruz. The bust
was interrupted when members of the Mexican army opened fire on the agents, killing seven of
them. The traffickers escaped. A videotape of the incident by a United States Customs
surveillance flight overhead indicated that the Mexican soldiers were protecting the traffickers.
According to Mexican press reports at the time, this was just one of a number of incidents in
which the military thwarted a police anti-drug operation.
A series of high-profile drug-related scandals in 1997 further exposed the depth of the corruption
problem in the Mexican military. In February the head of the federal anti-drug agency, General
Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested on charges of working for Juarez cartel leader Amado
Carrillo Fuentes. The agency was quickly disbanded and is now slowly being rebuilt. Then in
March, General Alfredo Navarro Lara was arrested for attempting to bribe the head federal
justice official in Baja California on behalf of the Arellano Mix brothers, the leaders of the
Tijuana drug cartel. A recent report by the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy
notes that 34 senior military officers have been targeted for disciplinary action because of drugrelated corruption. In the face of such high-level military corruption, Zedillo has remained firmly
committed to the militarization of law enforcement, putting the military in charge of federal
police functions in at least eight states, as well as in Mexico City.
Meanwhile, the incentive for the PRI-dominated political system to turn to illicit revenue may be
increasing as other sources of funding dry up. As Nora Lustig observed in the spring 1996 issue
of the Brookings Review, "One facet of the PRI crisis is financial. Long dependent on
contributions from (or raised through) the government, the party is ill-prepared to find
alternatives." Some of the more militant officials may be tempted "to turn to 'donations' from

unsavory sources, such as narco-traffickers." Concerns about economic stability may also inhibit
major anticorruption initiatives. "Unfortunately, the rule of law is to a certain extent hostage to
Mexico's financial vulnerability," Lustig explains. "The nation's leaders can probably not afford
to uncover the questionable or illegal activities [engaged in] by prominent members of the
political and business elites. The attempt to change the rules of the game too swiftly and
prosecute people for past wrongdoings could trigger a wave of capital outflows large enough to
threaten the fragile recovery."
FROM "CRISIS CORRUPTION" TO "NORMAL CORRUPTION"
Clues as to how the dynamics of corruption will eventually play out in Mexico's most important
illegal export sector may be found by looking at the past dynamics of corruption in Mexico's
most important legal export sector: oil. Drug corruption in Mexico may be a particularly striking
example of "crisis corruption," in which there are "many suppliers trading in extraordinary
stakes."4 This highly disruptive form of corruption is not unfamiliar to Mexico. In the late 1970s
Mexico experienced a rapid influx of oil revenues that, while not generating the violence
associated with the drug trade, nevertheless shares some similarities with the more recent influx
of drug profits. Michael Johnston notes that "key figures in PEMEX (the state oil corporation),
the Oil Workers Union, and the dominant political party (PRI) had long enjoyed a number of
politically significant and mutually profitable corrupt arrangements. But when oil revenues
began to grow rapidly in 1977, this corruption became particularly flagrant and disruptive. Old,
arrangements' in the oil industry gave way to intense competition over shares of the new wealth.
The new abuses became matters of considerable controversy, and PEMEX, PRI, and union
figures came under political attack from several quarters."5
By 1982, when the oil boom went bust, "it was evident that the nation had been `sacked' by more
than one set of actors... According to the government's own admission, the oil boom had whetted
unsavory appetites in the nation and had spawned a substantial increase in the level of corruption
throughout the nation."6 The influx of oil revenue had, Johnston notes, "thus placed
extraordinary resources in many hands, transforming formerly integrative forms of corruption
into disintegrative crisis corruption."
4 Michael Johnston, "The Political Consequences of Corruption," Comparative Politics, vol. 18,
no. 4 (July 1986), p. 472.
5 lbid., p. 473.
6 Judith Gentleman, Mexican Oil and Dependent Development (New York: Peter Lang, 1984),
quoted in Johnston, op. cit., p. 473.

This may describe the current Mexican situation in relation to drug profits. If Mexico's earlier oil
boom experience is any indication, today's drug-related crisis corruption will not necessarily produce political disintegration. Crisis corruption can be resolved in a number of ways. For
example, Johnston explains that a "leveling off in the influx of resources might make the stakes
of corruption more predictable, and thus less extraordinary, with improved chances of repeated
profits over longer periods of time serving to moderate prices and to regulate terms of exchange.
Mexico's oil industry had gone through earlier phases of rapid growth and flagrant corruption,
reverting to more accustomed forms of corruption during periods of more stable revenues."
Alternatively, he notes that "a few suppliers of corrupt stakes might become sufficiently powerful
to impose a degree of order upon corrupt processes, perhaps producing one or more systems of
cronyism or patronage." Applied to the drug trade in Mexico, either scenario suggests that the
relationship between drug smuggling and the state may eventually settle down, resulting in a
more stable, predictable, and less violent business environment.
Perhaps the best news for Mexico is that there are preliminary signs that Colombian cocaine traffickers are starting to reduce their reliance on Mexican smuggling routes by redeveloping routes
through the Caribbean and south Florida. It seems that the high cost of moving their product
through Mexico is scaring at least some of the illicit business away. A greater diversification of
smuggling routes may help to reduce corruption in Mexico. Yet as long as America's seemingly
insatiable appetite for imported psychoactive substances persists, Mexico's close proximity to the
United States market assures that the logic of narco-corruption will remain entrenched.