Some people would say it's too simple to argue that trafficking and violence would miraculously go away. TT: One of the strongest arguments that you make is the legalization argument. It’s important for people to understand that, so I had to bring the book up to date. That has largely changed, in that the new order of things is a real democratic system. There has been a decoupling of the highest levels of power from drug trafficking now. It gave a lot of space to organized crime to flourish, because there was so much money in it. In the old order of things in Mexico, the governmental system was a functioning mafia, and it controlled and regulated drug trafficking for the benefit of people in power. The old story provides the context for understanding what’s happening today in Mexico because it has a history to it. So the third edition essentially fast forwards into the present. In that sense, the book was out of date, because how drug trafficking operated under the PRI is completely different than how it works today in a new Mexico, under the democratically transformed Mexico. Poppa: The Mexico that I wrote about in the book describes the old order of things: Mexico under the PRI.
TT: Why did you feel the need to update the situation in Mexico 20 years later?
It also means that whatever gains Mexico has made toward becoming a true democracy will be eroded by this “corrosive” enterprise.Īn edited transcript of the interview and full audio follows. policy, he says, enables the multibillion-dollar drug industry to flourish and guarantees that when a drug kingpin is arrested or gunned down, another will emerge. Just before the release of the third edition of Drug Lord, Poppa spoke with the Tribune about the book's new epilogue, which details why Mexico continues to struggle with corruption - and why the U.S. When he was gunned down in 1987, he was replaced by an up-and-coming drug lord named Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the older brother of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes - the current head of the Juárez cartel, whose three-year battle with the Sinaloa’s Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has led to the deaths of more than 6,500 people in Juárez. Acosta was the leader in Ojinaga, a small outpost that sits across from the town Presidio, west of Big Bend. In it, Poppa explains the ins and outs of traffickers' "plaza system": A local leader is selected to be in charge of a territory and buys protection from law enforcement through bribes any other smuggler must pay the leader for permission to use the routes that run through his territory. The kidnapping eventually led to Drug Lord, Poppa’s 1990 book chronicling of the rise and fall of drug lord Pablo Acosta, who at the time of his death was one of the most wanted criminals in Mexico. The pictures got the photographer beaten up and kidnapped, and he was later sent back to deliver the threat to reporter Terrence Poppa, who had written the story about the hotel. That was the message delivered to the editors of the El Paso Herald-Post in the late 1980s by a photographer who snapped pictures of a hotel in Ciudad Juárez that was being constructed by drug kingpin Gilberto “El Greñas” Ontiveros, a high-ranking member of the Juárez cartel.