Border Junkies: Addiction and Survival on the Streets of Juárez and El Paso

Foreword

Opium expands what has no bound, lengthens the illimitable, deepens time, furrows pleasure, and fills the soul with dark wearisome felicities more than the soul can hold. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (translated by Keith Waldrop) The lineage of opiate narratives in Western societies stretches from the nineteenth century to the modern era: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Cocteau, William S. Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, Piri Thomas, Richard Hell. Across decades and centuries, the experience of opium, morphine, and heroin addiction has generated its own logic. Existence is reduced to the cellular need for dope, punctuated by bouts of euphoric delirium. Excess baggage is discarded or pawned as the junkie desperately acquires the money needed to buy the next fix, get high, and repeat the cycle. In the literary re-creation of this quest, florid details are disdained in the lean, narrowly focused prose of the panicked, hustling search to cop, but lush colors describe the pandemonium of opiate dreams, and a dark palette sketches in the excruciating pain of withdrawal and the inevitable physical and mental deterioration. Often, the ethnographic portrait of a heroin user mirrors its literary counterpart in its depiction of the single-mindedness of the addict. Anthropological accounts of addicts, however, pay much more attention to the economics and practical details of junkie life and less attention to the lyrical or morbid inner landscape of the addict—with some exceptions , especially the verbal poetry of the “righteous dopefiends” in Bourgois and Schonberg’s brilliant study. Comar’s narrative echoes the stark realities, the depths of despair, Howard Campbell F or e wor d x Border Junkies and the sensations of instant glory that permeate the classic opiate literature , and its emphasis on survival strategies and oppositional cultures contributes to the social science literature on addiction. While avoiding the narcissistic excesses of popular heroin-chic memoirs, Comar chronicles the specific dilemmas of the junkie life amid the transnational, bilingual context of the U.S.-Mexico border. In the process of absorbing this fine account, the reader gains insight into the underworld cultures of border dealers and addicts, and obtains a street-level sociological vision of drug trafficking and addiction in Ciudad Juárez, currently the world’s most dangerous city for murder and kidnapping and home to one of the largest drug cartels in the world. Border Junkies will be of considerable interest to students of the mental dimensions of drug addiction, the cultural bases of junkie adaptations , and the dynamic and evolving societies of the U.S.-Mexico border. Ciudad Juárez, the quintessential Mexican border city, has been an important center of contraband smuggling since at least Prohibition . In the aftermath of Prohibition, Ignacia Jasso de González (alias “La Nacha”) built a powerful heroin-smuggling organization from her home near the Paso del Norte international bridge that links Juárez and El Paso. Despite the visibility of her operation—physically observable from the U.S. side of the Rio Grande (Río Bravo)—La Nacha sold one-hit doses of Mexican black tar heroin to American GIs and Mexican addicts for immediate consumption, and larger quantities to smugglers who took La Nacha’s product far into the heartland of the United States. Although both the Mexican and U.S. governments pursued her aggressively, La Nacha resisted attempts to extradite her, and though she served several stints in Mexican prisons (including in the infamous Islas Marías), La Nacha did not let go of the heroin business until she died, a multimillionaire, of natural causes in 1977. Although La Nacha’s business was robust and multinational—linking the opium fields of Sinaloa and Durango through various clandestine processing laboratories in Jalisco and elsewhere to smuggling routes all the way to Chicago—domestic consumption of narcotics was relatively low in Mexico until the rise of the cocaine cartels of the 1980s. La Nacha had maintained street dope-selling corners in Juárez since the onset of her business, but it was not until the 1990s that the evil bloom of the tiendita (“little store”) or picadero (shooting gallery) system spread beyond the central city to encompass much of the surrounding areas. Foreword xi The Juárez cartel, founded by a federal police commander and a butcher in the 1980s, became a major international drug-trafficking organization , far exceeding the scope of La Nacha’s drug business. In the...