Benjamin Smith

Then there was always the danger of exposés. Occasionally, state authorities came down hard on journalists or members of civil society who tried to unmask the system.

On one of our trips into Mazatlán we ran into Mexican officials and entered into an agreement with them. We had to pay them $5,000 for protection and from that point on we had to buy our marijuana from them. Then we could land anywhere we wanted to.

He had been looking into the links between the Arizona vice industry and some of the state’s prestigious families. In the subsequent months, thirty-six of Bolles’s fellow journalists teamed up to try to pursue the investigation. They called it the Arizona Project.

The other principal causes of violence were the sporadic attempts to unmask these protection rackets. These attempts were made by everyday citizens and by journalists.

It probably didn’t occur to Mark, but he was enduring a niche form of torture. It was waterboarding Mexico-style.

And as Mark and many others found out, it was the narcs—and not the drug traffickers—who introduced widespread, frequent, and ruthless violence to the world of Mexican narcotics. It was also the narcs that started to take over the old locally run drug protection rackets.

But in reality, it was blackmail. The real aim was to sink the cross-border economy and coerce Mexico to adopt more stringent counternarcotics measures.

A drug war—armed and funded by the Americans—was a cheap way to reassert central control.

The PJF were not only inventing narcoviolence, they were also pioneering narcoculture.

This widespread use of informants ripped up nearly half a century of cooperation. It pulled apart old alliances and agreements, bred distrust and paranoia, and set traffickers against one another. In short, it created competition where there had been none.