Word: mexicanization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cheap, at about 20 cents per mg, and extremely potent: often 60% or 70% pure heroin. Conventional heroin, on the other hand, sells on the street at about $2.32 per mg and is rarely more than 6% pure. The Federal Drug Enforcement Administration has prepared a report citing the Mexican states of Sonora, Durango, Sinaloa and Guerrero as the main source of the new drug form. So far, black tar (also known as tootsie roll and Mexican mud) is most prevalent in the Western U.S., where it has produced an alarming increase in lethal overdoses. In Phoenix, authorities say, black...
...busiest new cocaine alley is the 2,100-mile Mexican border. "It's a sieve, and we don't have enough fingers to plug all the holes," says Drexel Watson, a senior special agent for the Customs Service. "More drugs than ever are coming in. It's pretty devastating." Mexico has become a conduit for as much as a third of the South American cocaine entering the U.S. Mexico is also grabbing larger shares of the U.S. markets for heroin and marijuana. Partly because of Mexico's economic woes, struggling farmers have boosted their crops of opium poppies and marijuana...
...agents play a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing, an inspection station that handles 27,000 vehicles a day. On one recent afternoon, a raggedly dressed vendor carrying a load of serapes could be seen watching the inspectors and tipping off the Mexican driver of a pickup truck to work his way over to lane 7, where a weary Customs officer was waving most cars through without a check. At the same time, another supposed vendor worked the other side, scrutinizing the vehicles for the Customs agents and whispering into a miniature radio...
...agents have been hamstrung in their efforts to catch smuggling kingpins south of the border because many Mexican government officials are on the traffickers' payroll. When smugglers tortured and murdered DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar near Guadalajara last March, Mexican investigators seemed to be looking the other way. But honest members of Mexico's government are just as upset as Americans about the violence bred by smuggling. In a massacre last November, an army of 50 marijuana traffickers equipped with automatic weapons shot and killed 17 Mexican police officers and seven guides...
...agent's killing. Verdugo, widely known as La Rana (the Frog), was walking the streets of tiny San Felipe, Mexico, on Jan. 24 when six masked men pounced on him and whisked him into an unmarked car. They drove their blindfolded captive north to an obscure stretch of the Mexican border near Calexico, Calif., where they handed him through a hole in the fence to U.S. marshals. He is now in a San Diego jail awaiting trial on smuggling charges...