For years there had been a casual relationship between Mexican marijuana smugglers and the Colombian cartels, and with the Florida corridor suddenly awash in lawmen, the cocaine traffic shifted almost overnight to the land route through Mexico.  At first the Mexicans were operating strictly as cargo handlers, picking the drug up from the Colombians on one side of the line and handing it back to them on the other for $1,000 a kilo. But in the early 1990s when the cartels were in a death struggle with the Colombian government, cash flow became a problem and they started paying the Mexicans off in cocaine. Since the muchachos already had a vast marijuana distribution network in the U.S., this new product line—pound for pound a hundred times more valuable than marijuana—was like rocket fuel in the gas tank of a low-rider.  A laid-back culture imbued with a tradition of mordida and skilled at corruption was suddenly supercharged. 

Throughout its tormented history, Mexico has been plagued by exemplary economic inequality. Most of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of about 30 families, while a fifth of the people live on less than a dollar a day. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party has routinely stolen the elections since its inception sixty years ago, creating a fertile climate for under-the-table payoffs. Almost everybody seems to be on the take, from the garbage man to the presidential cabinet, where a suitable gift of cash might get you appointed, say, Commandante of the Federal Judicial Police for Baja Califorinia Norte. For decades, cabinet officers and presidents routinely left office with unexplained fortunes.^[2] In the old days, mordida—the “bite”—was accepted as an efficient lubricator, a means of getting things done while sharing the wealth in an otherwise unequal society.  But with the arrival of the narco-billions everything shifted gears.

In 1988, after a key official in the previous administration was implicated in the torture-killing of a U.S. drug agent, President Carlos Salinas took office with a promise not to tolerate any more high-level corruption.^[3]  He came out swinging and