Crisis, corruption and state-led development in the making of the Mexican drug trade

Bibliographic Data

ID4162337
AuthorsN Morris (0000-0003-0098-4604, University College London, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume265
Issue1
Pages235-273
Publication date2024-10-25
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePast & Present (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gtad028
OpenAlexW4393120697
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited10

The state of Durango has long been a centre of Mexican heroin production and an important node in transnational drug trafficking networks. As early as 1944, it was the site of one of the biggest drug busts in Mexican history, when an opium poppy plantation the size of 325 football pitches, irrigated by a purpose-built aqueduct, was discovered in the state's northern mountains. By the mid 1970s, a combination of kinship ties and concrete connected these poppy fields directly with the US drug market hub of Chicago, Illinois, along a route known as the 'heroin highway', which helped Mexico become the supplier of 90 per cent of US heroin. But how did a poor, underpopulated and overwhelmingly rural state become a major player in the billion-dollar US-Mexican drug trade? This article shows that in Durango, the rise of heroin production and trafficking were integral aspects of local processes of social, political and economic modernization. Stimulated by the Mexican and US governments' promotion of infrastructural improvements and mass migration, and protected by representatives of Mexico's post-revolutionary political system, the drug trade in turn fuelled further 'licit' economic development, making it part of the very foundation of Mexico as we know it today

Art · Development economics · Drug · Economics · Language change · Literature · Political science · Psychiatry · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Psychology

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