Time line of the "Drug War"

Offically it all started way back in the 1980's with this...

Miguel De la Madrid (1982-88) - De la Madrid's favorite narco was a rude capo by the name of Rafael Caro Quintero, a Sinaloa boy with 10,000 hectares of marijuana under cultivation in Bufalo Chihuahua (U.S. production had not yet gained dominance.) Somehow De la Madrid's defense secretary who then ran the nation's rudimentary drug war could never locate this enormous swatch of greenery. Then a DEA contract pilot did a flyover, spotted the patch, and informed his boss, Kiki Camarena, a U.S. agent based in Guadalajara, of the find. Caro Quintero's gunsills kidnapped the two, tortured them to death, and buried them in a shallow grave on a Michoacan hog farm. Caro, who carried picture I.D. describing him as a Mexican security agent, then fled to Costa Rica.

The discovery of Camarena's body put the Reagan administration on a war footing with Mexico. Ambassador John Gavin, an even worse actor than his boss, threatened invasion. De la Madrid, whose government was hopelessly beholden to Washington for the 1982 Mexican debt crisis bail out, had no alternative and Caro Quintero was brought back home to face the music and wound up running a discotheque in a Mexico City penitentiary.

But Rafael Caro Quintero, who had once purportedly offered to pay off Mexico's record $102 billion USD foreign debt, was a Sinaloa boy and De la Madrid's commitment to the Sinaloa cartel remained solid.

* Carlos Salinas (1988-94): De la Madrid's party, the long-ruling PRI, had stolen the 1988 election and his successor Carlos Salinas needed Washington's approbation badly, entering into preliminary negotiations with George Bush I for a North American Free Trade Agreement. Bush wanted two concessions: a brake on the flow of Central American migrant workers through Mexico into the U.S. (Mexico subsequently upped deportation rates 100 per cent) and the head of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the Sinaloa capo who made the Colombian connection. Salinas complied.

Salinas's consentido was one Juan Garcia Abrego whose family had been involved in moving contraband across the east end of the border for generations. The Gulf Cartel, as his gang was dubbed, dominated the trade in Salinas's native state Nuevo Leon and black sheep brother Raul reportedly partied with Garcia Abrego on the weekends. The Gulf Cartel flourished by utilizing landing strips on Navy bases in Tamaulipas to fly in the blow from the south.

But the Sinaloa boys did not vanish from the scene after the incarceration of Felix Gallardo - they just moved the shop closer to the border in Tijuana. The 11-member Arellano Felix clan, all nieces and nephews of Uncle Miguel Angel, took over the empire. Their juice during the Salinas years was made abundantly clear after the Cardinal of Guadalajara was assassinated in May '93 during a shoot-out between Arellano Felix pistoleros and another Sinaloa faction under the tutelage of a young turk named Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Indeed two Arellano Felix brothers were given safe conduct to and from Mexico City to negotiate the matter with Papal Nuncio Giralamo Prigione. When Prigione rang up Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, to inform the President that the two most wanted drug dealers in Mexico were sitting in his living room, Salinas seemed uninterested.

* Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000): During Zedillo's stint at the helm of state, the U.S. Congress humiliated Mexico with annual certification of the country's cooperation in the White House-declared War on Drugs. To placate the Clinton administration, which had once again rescued Mexico from default during the economic collapse of 1995-6, Salinas's successor (and ultimately bitter rival) each year would offer up a fresh capo on the eve of the certification vote.

Zedillo's final tender was the Salinas pet Garcia Abrego and the trade shifted from the Gulf Cartel to the middle of the border in Ciudad Juarez under the stewardship of yet another Sinaloa boy Amado Carrillo, "The Lord of the Skies", who revolutionized the business by flying DC-6's loaded with Colombian blow straight into the border region.

One reason for Carrillo's spectacular success: he enjoyed the protection of Zedillo's drug czar General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo. The General went down in 1997 just weeks after he had been praised at a ceremony in the Clinton White House. Gutierrez Rebollo's fall presaged Carrillo's - "The Lord of the Skies" expired the next year in a private hospital not a mile from Los Pinos, purportedly during a liposuction procedure.

* Vicente Fox/Felipe Calderon (2000-2010): The Mexican political structure changed spots in 2000 when the right-wing PAN party candidate Vicente Fox vanquished the PRI. A month after Fox's inauguration in December, El Chapo Guzman walked out of a Super-Maxi in Jalisco, and has never been seen or touched since although he remains in plain sight as testified to by the recent face-to-face interview of his closest confederate El Mayo Zambada by veteran newshound Julio Scherer (El Mayo offered to hook Scherer up with El Chapo.)

Under Fox, the Chapo ("Shorty") consolidated his position as Mexico's Narco of the Decade and is currently listed by Forbes Magazine as the 42nd most powerful potentate on the planet, ahead of world leaders like France's Sarkozy.

The latest phase of this charade began six days after Fox's successor Felipe Calderon took the oath of office. Calderon, like Salinas, had been awarded the 2006 election amidst widespread allegations of fraud. Half the electorate believed that he had obtained office by wholesale flimflam and he needed the authority of the military and the backing of Washington to legitimatize his presidency. 30,000 troops were dispatched to Calderon's home state of Michoacan and the President donned an Army field jacket two sizes too big for him under the illusion that war confers authority.

Three years later, 23,000 Mexican citizens are dead and Calderon has learned that the people in whose name the war is being fought turn against their rulers when the wars they fight are perceived to be losing ones.

As noted, Mexican presidents boost the fortunes of their consentidos by taking down their rivals and leaving the favored ones alone. In an analysis of 50,000 drug war arrests since 2006, specialist Edgardo Buscalgia counts only 2000 low level Chapo operators - the rest are all in the employ of Chapo's rivals, the Beltran Leyva gang in particular.

The Beltran Leyvas, who had split off from El Chapo and formed their own cartel, were taken out last December in a Cuernavaca search and destroy mission, their hideaway probably discreetly disclosed to authorities by El Chapo himself. Not unsurprisingly, the Army, which is thought to have been compromised by the drug cartels, was kept purposefully out of the picture - Navy Marines were the primary security forces deployed in the raid.

For the past 20 years, the Generals had been the go-to guys in Mexico's many drug wars, having replaced relentlessly corrupt police agencies. Now the Navy has replaced the Generals.

[edit on 1-5-2010 by DaddyBare]

Thanks for this!

Can you link some sources and pictures just for fun?? All the blocks of text made my eyes hurt.
--

But seriously, thanks for this compilation!!

reply to post by TheBloodRed


Sure can
Lets start with Rafael Caro Quintero
Here's a bio on Carlos Salinas de Gortari
Then we have another major player Juan García Abrego
And of course Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo
We have the Lord of the sky's Amado Carrillo Fuentes he was the first to use fleets of planes to bring drugs in
One of the most famous bad Generals is José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo
As I've already giving you a weeks worth of reading I'll end with the current to bad guy "El Chapo" Joaquín Guzmán Loera