Portrait of a dope-smuggling cowboy

LIVE TO TELL THE TALE

In Contrabando, Don Henry Ford writes of his 10 years as a marijuana smuggler on the Texas-Coahuila border. The book fills some major gaps in what we know about the border drug trade: the role of illegal crops in the Mexican countryside; the murky beginnings of the machinations of the CIA, the DEA, the Medellín cartel and the Nicaraguan contras in expanding the cocaine market in the U.S.; and, it is the personal testimony of a man who spent years of his life in the business, and lived to tell the tale.
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Contrabando: Confessions of a Drug-Smuggling Texas Cowboy. Don Henry
Ford, Jr. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005.

Don Henry Ford came into the world with three special gifts: great
skill at working the land and raising animals; a knack for smuggling
just about anything; and a unique voice for telling stories. In
Contrabando, Ford uses his considerable talent as a writer to tell the
story of his life as a farmer and a smuggler.

In a recent article in the major publication of the Latin American
Studies Association, (Recent Research on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Latin
American Research Review 39(3): 205-220) Josiah Heyman, Chair of
Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso,
criticizes reductionism in the media and in academic work on the
U.S.-Mexico border. According to Heyman, a few topics—drug
trafficking, maquiladoras, the murders of women, and pollution—suck up
all the coverage of the border region. And because of their
sensational nature, academic works in these areas tend toward the
shallow, and the journalistic accounts toward the yellow.

In a specific reference to the border drug business, Heyman laments
the lack of real and verifiable data on the daily life of the
trade—its effects on families, businesses, society and culture—but,
neither journalists nor social scientists have made much progress in
researching this dangerous and subterranean activity. He does add a
footnote concerning several recent works on narcocorridos.

Heyman doesn't mention the one other account of the border drug trade,
Druglord: the Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin, by journalist
Terrence Poppa (originally published by Pharos 1990, and in a second
edition by Demand Publications 1998). It provides some detail on the
daily life of Pablo Acosta who ruled the business in Ojinaga during
the 1980s. Poppa describes Acosta's marathon days and nights, keeping
himself going with huge amounts of cocaine or crack, as he tries to
satisfy an endless number of petitions from his customers and
underlings. And we even see Pablo, speaking in the voices of the
characters as he tells the Snow White story to his kids.

For Heyman and others interested in the "real" life of the border, Don
Henry Ford's new memoir, Contrabando, will be welcome fare.

Ford is a man with hardcore Texas roots. Now 47, he recounts a period
of his own life that reveals the prehistory of the border drug trade,
in the years immediately before it metastasized into its current
"splendor." Like hundreds or perhaps thousands of his cohorts, Ford
belonged to that band of small-time smugglers and dealers who must
remain forever anonymous, or in the worse case, find themselves
reduced to a bloody street shot in the crime section of Mexican
newspapers. As a freelance marijuana smuggler, Ford brushed up against
the likes of Pablo Acosta and Amado Carrillo, but in contrast to their
star power, he remained in the shadows.

In the late 1970s, Don Henry Ford is a gringo rancher in West Texas
who tries his hand at farming and finds that it is impossible to make
a living. So, to get out of debt and to support his family (and his
own habit) he imports a few loads of pot. He gradually cultivates
suppliers amongst campesinos in Durango and Coahuila and discovers
that they face even more dire ruin on their ejido lands, thanks to the
decrepit Mexican economic system. So, for the next 10 years, Ford
makes his living smuggling marijuana on the Texas-Coahuila border in
the region of the Big Bend National Park.

But, Contrabando does much more than tell personal stories. The book
goes a long way toward filling in at least three gaping holes in our
knowledge of the border drug trade.

First and foremost, Contrabando details the role played by the drug
trade in the substitution of crops grown in the Mexican countryside.
Traditional corn and beans are displaced by much more profitable
marijuana and opium poppies. In his book, El Negocio: La economia de
Mexico atrapada por el narcotrafico=The Business: The Mexican Economy
Trapped by the Drug Trade (Grijalbo 2001), Carlos Loret de Mola tries
to calculate the actual size of the drug business in the Mexican
economy. The figure most often cited by various experts and in the
media (and by the Mexican Justice Department itself in 1994) is USD$30
billion. But, Loret de Mola's book does not contain any specific
information relating to the day-to-day activities of Mexican
campesinos participating in the drug economy.

Contrabando is different. Ford sets up his commercial networks in both
directions—bringing marijuana into the United States, and smuggling
guns and ammunition into Mexico. While remaining a little vague about
the location of his suppliers in the mountains of Durango, he does
provide ample details on the community of Piedritas, Coahuila.

Ford describes his partners and their communities with acuity and
sensitivity. The inhabitants of the border region have subsisted for
generations on profits generated by smuggling different goods of
value: liquor, candelilla wax, birds, sugar, etc. Their work as
"contrabandistas" is a natural outgrowth of their time and place and a
creative response to the backwardness of the Mexican economy.

In addition to the pot smuggling details, Ford paints a vivid picture
of life on the ejido. He is taught how to prepare refried beans and
barbeque and he learns the cultural norms of the village with respect
to time, individualism and the distribution of meager material goods.
Ford draws on his own extensive ranching experience as he describes
his partner Beto's expert horsemanship during the daily ranch chores.

Ford's memoir fills another vacuum in the history of the border drug
trade. He provides details concerning the roles of the CIA, the DEA,
the Medellín cartel, and the Nicaraguan contras in the consolidation
of the cocaine market in the United States in the early 1980s. During
his time in Piedritas, Ford witnessed Colombian planes landing at a
secret airstrip near the neighboring ejido of San Miguel. Involved in
this new traffic were Alejandro Cerna, an operative of the Medellín
cartel, and Mike Palmer, a guy Ford remembers as someone who "made
money from all sides of the issue: the traffickers, the DEA and the
CIA."

In his book, Dark Alliance (Seven Stories 1998), journalist Gary Webb
traces the role of the CIA in the explosion of the crack cocaine trade
in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, a byproduct of the use of drug sales
to finance the Contra war in Nicaragua. Palmer appears in Dark
Alliance as a drug dealer working for a company called Vortex Aviation
run indirectly by the CIA, providing air transport services through a
supposed humanitarian agency of the U.S. State Department.

In Druglord, Terrence Poppa notes that the first clandestine flights
from Colombia to Mexico transporting the goods of the Medellín cartel
began to arrive at the Ojinaga airport and nearby rural airstrips in
late 1984 and early 1985. In 1986, the residents of Piedritas were
employed to unload and refuel three planes from Colombia piloted by
Mike Palmer that landed near their village. Two of the planes carried
marijuana and the third, 700 kilos of cocaine. These flights have the
dubious distinction of being the forerunners of the huge explosion of
cocaine traffic into the United States that took place in the 1990s.

It would be irresponsible to glamorize the runaway expansion of the
drug economy in the 1990s. Its vast and uncontrollable growth is more
like a cancer that has left its bloody marks on countless grieving
families along both sides of the border. Don Henry Ford never got the
chance to enjoy the glory days of the 1990s drug world. He spent that
decade in a federal prison cell, with ample time to reflect on his
actions.

But, he lived to tell the tale and the product, Contrabando, is indeed
a unique contribution to the bibliography of the border drug trade.
Contrabando accurately portrays the daily life of many actors in the
business, something that (as Josiah Heyman correctly notes) remains
far out of reach of journalists and academics—unless they figure out
some way to publish a book from beyond the grave.

If you want to learn about the business that really keeps the Mexican
economy afloat, then you must meet the campesinos who became Ford's
partners in the trade. You will also need to come face to face with
the corrupt police. And the army. And death. If you want to understand
why so many U.S. and Mexican citizens lie buried on the border, even
if nobody really gives a damn about them, then Contrabando is the
Bible.

It's hard to argue with a witness like Don Henry Ford, a man who spent
years enmeshed in the dark entrails of the business. Contrabando is
the only document of its kind, at least until Amado Carrillo comes
back from the grave and decides to tell us his story.