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Mexico’s Long Dirty War

Alexander Aviña

To cite this article: Alexander Aviña (2016) Mexico’s Long Dirty War, NACLA Report on the
Americas, 48:2, 144-149, DOI: 10.1080/10714839.2016.1201271

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 REPORT
ALEXANDER AVIÑA
Mexico’s Long Dirty War
The origins of Mexico’s drug wars can be found in the
Mexican state’s decades-long attack on popular movements
advocating for social and economic justice.
A
n Israeli-made military transport aircraft, the
Arava 201, reveals the intimate historical links
between counterinsurgency, narco-trafficking,
and Mexico’s drug wars, which exploded in the mid-
2000s. Nicknamed the “avocado” for its dark green
color and ovoid shape, Mexican military officials used
the plane during the 1970s to both dump scores of sus-
pected guerrillas into the Pacific Ocean and transport
illicit drugs into the United States from the southwest-
ern state of Guerrero. These death flights and narco-
trafficking voyages originated from the same Pie de la
Cuesta military airbase, located near the resort city of
Acapulco, and involved the same group of military of-
ficers who were highly trained and well-versed in the
dark arts of “population-centric” counterinsurgency—
a form of counterinsurgency that views armed control
over populations as the key to militarily destroying in-
surgent movements. According to declassified Mexican
spy reports and military tribunal testimony, military of-
ficers like Mario Acosta Chaparro and Francisco Quiroz
Hermosillo seamlessly coupled the brutal repression
of peasant guerrillas and social activists with direct
participation in the growing and trafficking of narcot-
ics during the 1970s. The brutal eradication of social
movements that critiqued a form of developmentalist
capitalism that urbanized and industrialized post-1940
Mexico on the backs of exploited peasant communities
and the formation of one key sector of the drug trade
went hand-in-hand. And for such tasks the Arava 201,
the flying avocado, proved a useful tool.
The different Cold War histories that the Arava air-
plane represents are key to understanding the contem-
porary Mexican war on drugs, which since 2006 has
claimed the lives of well over 100,000 people and led to
144 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS, 2016, VOL. 48, NO. 2, 144-149, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2016.1201271
© 2016 North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)
NACLA_48-2.indd 144
the disappearance of more than 25,000 others. We can-
not fully understand the emergence of a transnational
narcotics economy in Mexico if we fail to appreciate the
constitutive role played by the very same military forces
that waged violent counterinsurgency in Guerrero, on
the orders of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI), during the late 1960s and 1970s. In ad-
dition to individual agents like Acosta Chaparro and
Quiroz Hermosillo, two military men who embody
the linkages between the anti-Left counterinsurgency
and the emergence of the Mexican drug trade, we have
witnessed in recent decades the blending together of
practices and epistemologies of counterinsurgency, on
the one hand, and counternarcotics, on the other, into
a broader praxis of militarized rural governance. This
method of governance primarily focuses on violently
repressing the symptomatic manifestations of deeper
structural inequalities and political factors that influ-
ence peasant participation in armed struggle or within
the political economy of narcotics. In Guerrero of the
1970s, counterinsurgency and counternarcotics be-
came one in the same operation. In an effort to deprive
armed struggles led by schoolteachers Genaro Vázquez
and Lucio Cabañas of any political legitimacy beyond
their geographic areas of operation, the PRI publicly
presented its actions in the state as a struggle against
bandits and narco-traffickers. In reality those armed
struggles viewed the overthrow of a repressive, oligar-
chic PRI, which had betrayed its radical origin in the
1910 Mexican revolution, as a prelude to the achieve-
ment of a radically-democratic socialist state. All the
while, certain military units and officers allied them-
selves with narco-traffickers in a concerted effort to
eliminate the guerrillas and their supporters.
6/27/16 7:18 PM
 The family of Antonio Vivar Díaz, a teacher and activist who was killed in protests over the Ayotzinapa case and Guerrero’s
state elections, greeted a commission from Ayotzinapa at his wake. June 8, 2015. Tlapa, Guerrero. EMILY PEDERSON
Recent U.S. journalistic treatments of the narco-
fueled violence rightly point to the 1980s and early
1990s and the “structural realignment” of the Mexican
economy as a moment when the Mexican state adopted
neoliberal economic policies, precipitating permanent
austerity for Mexico’s working masses and the coter-
minous rise of drug cartels and the drug economy in
the midst of widespread pauperization. But the use of
a publicly heralded, moral panic-infused war on drugs
campaign that provided cover for the covert persecu-
tion of leftists and revolutionary groups—and blurred
the lines between counterinsurgency and counter-
narcotics in its violent persecution of peasant drug
farmers—began in the early 1970s in Guerrero.
That war continued in subsequent decades, target-
M
ing communities and individuals that protested the
social and economic costs of “structural realignment”
during the 1980s; voted for and actively belonged to
NACLA_48-2.indd 145
opposition political parties in the 1990s; protected
land tenure rights, forests, and water sources in the
post-NAFTA 1990s; and, in the 2000s, communally
challenged the arrival of land-grabbing foreign mining
companies in the so-called “Guerrero gold belt.” All the
while, those responsible for waging this war—individ-
uals within the Mexican military and different police
apparatuses—collaborated with narco-traffickers and
helped establish the foundations for the U.S.-Mexico
drug trade we know today. The story of Guerrero and
the Arava airplane thus reveal the historical (and ideo-
logical) limits of the current drug war—at least as de-
fined and understood by political elites and mainstream
media on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
exicans have experienced a series of drug wars
that scholars like Isaac Campos trace back
to the early twentieth century. These early
SUMMER 2016 | NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 145
6/27/16 7:18 PM
 If the early, militarized drug interdiction programs failed in curbing
drug production, they succeeded in making the Mexican military a
permanent presence in rural areas associated with the production
of marijuana and opium.
attempts to institute drug control regimes—and target
specific populations—at the same time consistently
witnessed the participation of select state authorities in
the illicit drugs business, particularly members of the
Mexican military and political officials. While some
local and regional politicians and political bosses di-
rectly participated in the business, by the 1940s PRI
elites at the national level at least tacitly understood
the sort of politician-military-landed elite-peasant alli-
ances that were needed at the local and regional level to
make the drug business work smoothly in geographic
areas of concentrated drug production. In a recent ar-
ticle on the “rise and fall” of what he calls “narcopopu-
lism,” the historian Benjamin Smith demonstrates how
such an alliance worked during the 1940s in the state
of Sinaloa—cradle of the Mexican drug economy and
its most famous narco-leaders—as the cementing of a
profitable opium economy helped defuse rural class
conflict. Informal pacts forged between PRI politicians,
military personnel, police agents, drug cultivators, and
traffickers served as a foundation for the sort of nation-
al level PRI-drug cartel collaboration that eventually
emerged in the 1980s. Such arrangements coexisted
alongside haphazard national drug interdiction cam-
paigns that began in the late 1940s, with the novel use
of the military as a prime and permanent anti-narcotics
force. One consistent result from this early, militarized
interdiction strategy was an increase in drug produc-
tion, as fleeing cultivators and traffickers branched out
to geographic areas not immediately subject to military
or police intervention.
Two major anti-narcotics operations in the mid-
1970s, Operation Canador and Operation Condor, evi-
dence this correlation between militarized interdiction
(including the introduction of aerial spraying of herbi-
cides, like Paraquat, on marijuana and opium poppy
farms) and increased drug production. The latter opera-
tion, focused on the “golden triangle” region in north-
ern Mexico, involved the use of 2,300 soldiers and 200
federal police—along with 30 U.S. agents—and sought
146 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS | VOL. 48, NO. 2
NACLA_48-2.indd 146
to locate and destroy drug farms and laboratories in the
highland regions where the states of Sinaloa, Durango
and Chihuahua intersect. In addition to the systematic
violation of campesino human rights and simultane-
ous attacks on leftist dissidents, the action resulted in
the dispersal of major players in the illicit drug econ-
omy. Leading traffickers, like the Sinaloa native and
ex-Federal Police officer Miguel Ángel Félix Arellano,
fled to places like Guadalajara where they enjoyed the
protection of the Federal Directorate of Security (DFS),
Mexico’s version of the FBI, fresh off its bloody, covert
war against urban guerrillas who wanted a new Marxist,
proletarian Mexican revolution. In that city emerged the
Guadalajara cartel, “a centralized regulatory gangster
regime supported by the PRI state,” as authors Carmen
Boullosa and Mike Wallace recently described it in a
2015 web article for Jacobin. They also went to Guerrero,
a place where a brutal counterinsurgency against peas-
ant guerrillas beginning in the late 1960s brought local
narco-caciques and military officials together.
I
f the early, militarized drug interdiction programs
failed in curbing drug production, they succeeded
in making the Mexican military a permanent pres-
ence in rural areas associated with the production
of marijuana and opium. And Guerrero represented
one such region. A state with a history of small-scale
opium poppy flower and marijuana cultivation dat-
ing back to at least the latter half of the nineteenth
century, it attracted the attention of both PRI politi-
cal leaders and military officials—particularly during
the turbulent 1960s, an era that also witnessed the
exponential rise of drug production. Amidst a series
of popular protest movements that challenged the au-
tocratic single party rule of the PRI and its inequitable
capitalist development model that subsidized industry
and agribusiness while pauperizing campesino com-
munities, the military launched a series of repressive
campaigns that targeted both criminal activity and
anti-PRI social movements.
6/27/16 7:18 PM
 Indeed, the military and state police forces equated
both targets as the same thing in their heavy-handed
use of terror to quell social dissidence and protest.
Reformist demands—based on the 1917 Mexican
Constitution—for actually existing electoral democracy,
independent unions not linked to the PRI, meaning-
ful agrarian reform, and state capital support for the
marginalized, small-scale campesino agricultural sector
provoked escalating levels of state violence and politi-
cal radicalization. After a series of massacres in 1960,
1962-63, and 1967 that resulted in the death of numer-
ous peaceful protestors and the application of everyday
forms of terror against dissidents throughout the 1960s,
educators Vázquez and Cabañas organized two separate
peasant guerrilla organizations. The movements viewed
insurrectionary violence as the necessary tactical re-
sponse to permanently end the PRI’s “oligarchic” terror.
The broader goal, in the words of an elderly guerrilla
partisan who was disappeared by the military in 1972
(and who had also participated in the 1910 revolution),
was “a government of campesino-popular extraction”
capable of providing rural communities with employ-
ment, economic justice, hospitals, schools, healthcare,
and educational opportunities.
At the same time, an exponential increase in mari-
juana demand from the U.S. and the successful closing
down of the “French Connection” pipeline that brought
heroin into the United States from Turkey, via Marseille
processing laboratories, contributed to an increase in
marijuana and opium poppy production in the rugged
Guerrero highlands, as well in the northern “golden tri-
angle” states. By the early 1970s, Guerrero represented
a violent social matrix in which peasant guerrilla in-
surrections with revolutionary goals, sustained by rural
communal support, coexisted alongside the commodi-
fication of “Acapulco Gold” marijuana and “Mexican
Mud” brown heroin destined for U.S. markets.
In response to peasant guerrillas who spoke of so-
cialism and national liberation, and had begun to ex-
ecute hated local caciques and state police officers, PRI
leaders secretly ordered a series of counterinsurgent
military campaigns beginning in 1969 that violently
targeted rural communities suspected of providing
material and political support to the guerrillas. While
declassified military documents reveal the explicit
counterinsurgent nature of such operations, PRI and
military officials publicly denied the existence of guer-
rillas in the state. Instead, they cast the military build-
up in Guerrero (estimates generally identify a force of
NACLA_48-2.indd 147
24,000 soldiers and state police forces) as a response to
rampant criminality, describing their efforts as an an-
ti-crime and counternarcotics campaign that targeted
“cattle thieves,” “bandits,” and narco-traffickers. Using
counter-narcotics as a public mask for anti-leftist coun-
terinsurgency, President Luis Echeverría (1970-1976)
and General Hermenegildo Cuenca Diaz (then head of
the Armed Forces) sought to politically delegitimize
guerrilla groups, who threatened to move beyond the
confines of Guerrero and interface with other armed
revolutionary groups and nonviolent student, labor,
and landless peasant movements at the national level.
This criminalizing discourse provided ready-made
justification for the sort of atrocities committed by the
military and police in their pursuit of the guerrillas
and their supporters beginning in 1969.
Remembered as Mexico’s “Dirty War” (1969-1978),
soldiers, police, and spy agents sought to exterminate
the guerrillas by violently attacking supportive ru-
ral communities and working-class urban neighbor-
hoods, namely in coastal Guerrero, using a variety of
brutal tactics: torture, extrajudicial executions, rape,
the razing and bombing of villages, the collective pun-
ishment of communities, strategic hamlets, restrict-
ing the availability of food and medicine for besieged
peasant communities, death flights, and hundreds
of disappearances. As early as 1969, alliances forged
with local narco-traffickers provided military officials
with intelligence on the location of highland guerrilla
camps. Indeed, the location and killing of Cabañas by
Mexican soldiers in December 1974 was allegedly fa-
cilitated by information provided by a local marijuana
grower. In an official public statement, the Secretariat
of National Defense reported Cabañas’ death as that
of a “criminal” who worked with and protected “drug
traffickers,” among other criminal groups.
A Mexican military captain at this time, Mario
Acosta Chaparro, played a key role the counterin-
surgent struggle against the Cabañas-led Party of the
Poor guerrillas. Having received specialized military
training by the U.S. military at Fort Bragg and Fort
Benning in 1969-1970, Acosta Chaparro subsequently
helped plan the counterinsurgent campaigns against
the Guerrero guerillas that violently targeted peasant
communities as the key to destroying the insurrec-
tion. By 1974, after his promotion to the rank of ma-
jor, he was sent out to the highlands—alongside then
lieutenant colonel Quiroz Hermosillo, commander
of a military police battalion—and helped liberate
SUMMER 2016 | NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 147
6/27/16 7:18 PM
 A banner with faces of the 43 missing students hangs at the entrance to the Fortín neighborhood in Tixtla, Guerrero, the
town where the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College is located. It reads, “Tixtla and El Fortín support the families of the 43
disappeared Ayotzinapa students. They took them alive, we want them alive!” February 6, 2015. EMILY PEDERSON

the guerrillas’ most prized captive: Ruben Figueroa
Figueroa, a powerful PRI political boss, politician, and
personal friend of President Echeverría. After the kill-
ing of Cabañas in late 1974, Figueroa became the gov-
ernor of Guerrero (1975-1981) and kept both Acosta
Chaparro and Quiroz Hermosillo in the state as heads
of different police bodies. In practice, their tasks in-
volved the final elimination of guerrilla remnants and
the repression of social dissidence (particularly teach-
ers and students) that gradually emerged in the state in
response to Figueroa’s unabashedly authoritarian and
violent ruling style.
According to reports produced by the Mexican
Special Prosecutor’s Office for Past Social and Political
Movements in 2006 and the Guerrero State Truth
Commission in 2014, both military officials directly par-
ticipated in the torture and execution of more than 100
people—some of whom were placed in Arava planes
and dumped off the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. Acosta
Chaparro allegedly used a pistol, dubbed the “aveng-
ing sword,” in dozens of those executions. At the same
time, declassified spy reports refer to the existence of a
quasi-military death squad, known as “Group Blood,” as
responsible for eliminating critics of Governor Figueroa
and the Mexican military. Comprised of at least 30
former police and military officers and led by Captain
Francisco Javier Barquín, the group had its origins in
the early 1970s when spy documents first reported
its appearance. Initially linked to Quiroz Hermosillo,
Group Blood, or “The 6th Group of Annihilation” as
it identified itself in a 1974 letter the death squad sent
to a local newspaper promising to execute Cabañistas,
used gasoline in its torture of alleged guerrilla support-
ers. After forcing their captives to drink gasoline, Group
Blood then lit the campesinos on fire and threw their
charred corpses into the streets of Acapulco.

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NACLA_48-2.indd 148 6/27/16 7:18 PM

 Simply put, the Dirty War, the counterinsurgent core of Mexico’s war
on drugs, never ended. It became a method of governance, a way
of ruling Guerrero that prioritized force and coercion over consensus
and was sustained by an intimate collaboration between military
forces, state police, political bosses, and narco-caciques.
The death squad reported directly to the governor
and the governor alone, and by 1976, it broadened its
scope of activities to include local narco-traffickers and
the drug trade. In addition to repressing dissent, Group
Blood shook down narco-traffickers “in order to come
to an agreement,” according to a declassified DFS re-
port dated May 14, 1976. More pliant traffickers pub-
licly cooperated with military officials like Lt. Colonel
Luis Aguirre Ramírez—a 1961 School of the Americas
graduate—who worked as Figueroa’s head of the State
Judicial Police and was known to hand out police badg-
es to his protected narcos. By the late 1970s, allegedly
acting on the orders of Quiroz Hermosillo, Captain
Barquín and other Group Blood members coordinated
the shipment of narcotics to the northern frontier using
Mexican Air Force planes—including the Arava.
After Operation Condor attacked drug farms and
campesinos in northern Mexico in 1977, major traf-
fickers visited Guerrero and found a region already
producing large amounts of marijuana and opium
poppies—and ruled largely by force with authorities
already embroiled in the drug trade. Mexican journal-
ist Humberto Padgett’s 2015 award-winning article for
SinEmbargo collected the oral histories of campesinos
gomeros (opium poppy farmers) who recalled the vis-
its of major traffickers—including the future found-
ers of the Guadalajara and Ciudad Juárez cartels—and
the direct involvement of military officials like Acosta
Chaparro, who owned marijuana and opium poppy
farms. Indeed, Acosta Chaparro attracted the attention
of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) as early as
1984. By the 1990s, both he and Quiroz Hermosillo,
as generals, collaborated with and helped protect the
Ciudad Juárez Cartel—an organization co-founded by a
DFS commander, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, and Amado
Alexander Aviña is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. He is the author of the award-winning Specters of
Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014).
NACLA_48-2.indd 149
Carrillo Fuentes, a Sinaloan trafficker nicknamed the
“Lord of the Skies.”1 An intricate network of high-rank-
ing military officials, ex-DFS agents, state police officers,
and Sinaloan narco-traffickers thus created and protect-
ed the organization responsible for introducing much
of the cocaine into the United States during the 1990s.
T
he late journalist Charles Bowden once labeled
Ciudad Juárez the “laboratory” for our neoliberal,
post-NAFTA future. In similar fashion, 1970s
Guerrero served as the laboratory for Mexico’s contem-
porary war on drugs. Under the façade of this new narco-
war iteration, social activists, human rights activists, and
popular movements—many of whom retain long-stand-
ing critiques of Mexican capitalist development and the
PRI-state that once again sustains that development—
face the same sort of violence practiced during the 1970s.
Simply put, the Dirty War, the counterinsurgent core of
Mexico’s war on drugs, never ended. It became a method
of governance, a way of ruling Guerrero that prioritized
force and coercion over consensus and was sustained by
an intimate collaboration between military forces, state
police, political bosses, and narco-caciques. The horrific
2014 disappearance of 43 students from the rural teach-
ers’ college in Ayotzinapa—a longtime cradle of social
activism and leftist politics in Guerrero—poignantly tes-
tifies to the endurance of the Dirty War in Guerrero,
which since 2006 has gone national.
1 The three officers who cut their counterinsurgent teeth in 1970s Guerrero—
Acosta Chaparro, Quiroz Hermosillo, and Barquín—would be arrested in
2000 and convicted in military court in 2002 for narco-trafficking charges
related to their involvement with the Ciudad Juárez cartel. Quiroz Hermosillo
would die in prison while Acosta Chaparro was controversially exonerated
and released in 2006.
SUMMER 2016 | NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 149
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