Americanizing Mexican Drug Enforcement: The War on Drugs in Mexican Politics and Society, 1964-1982

Abstract

This dissertation tells the story of how U.S. drug control became externalized, and supply countries such as Mexico came to be seen as the cause for the U.S. drug problem. Rather than focusing on U.S. drug policy discourses emanating from Washington, D.C., however, the dissertation focuses on political and social circumstances in Mexico, how they interacted with U.S. drug policy execution, and the effects of these interactions. At the center of this narrative is what academics and scholars have called Mexico’s Dirty War, a period from 1964 to 1982, when the country’s ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), eliminated insurgent threats to its power from the left. I examine how, as the U.S. directed millions of dollars in resources to Mexico’s antidrug campaign beginning in 1969, the PRI used U.S. antidrug policies in ways that facilitated its counterinsurgency. This research, which draws from archival research in Mexico and the U.S., sheds new light on how local histories of political instability shaped the Mexican government’s response to the U.S. war on drugs. I examine how counterinsurgency-infused drug policing impacted the Mexican people—especially marginalized citizens residing in rural, drug-producing spaces—U.S. antidrug agents stationed in Mexico, and the militarization of the war on drugs at the upper echelons of U.S. and Mexican policymaking. Whereas historians have tended to focus on how the U.S. forced Mexico (and other supply countries) into compliance with its drug policies during the 1970s, my work draws attention to how local actors adopted U.S. drug policies in order to serve their own interests. Examining Mexico’s experience with U.S. drug policies reinforces the need to study the PRI’s counterinsurgency efforts at midcentury transnationally as much as the U.S. war on drugs. Mexican drug enforcement during the 1970s and 1980s, I argue, was (and continues to be) guided by U.S. antidrug ideas and policies, and Mexican leaders applied many of these lessons to policing drugs and insurgents, which produced a more violent outcome.