Herbicide spraying in Mexico

Herbicide spraying in Mexico was the destruction of illicit cannabis and opium poppy fields in Mexico with herbicides sprayed from helicopters, a method the Mexican government adopted in late 1975 and continued under Operation Condor from 1977. The chemicals were paraquat and 2,4-D.^: 8 The federal attorney general's office and the army ran the campaigns. The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sent agents and contract pilots. In 1987 the General Accounting Office reported that the United States Department of State and the Mexican attorney general's office had long been partners in the aerial programme. It put United States appropriations for it since 1977 at more than $150 million.^: 1 How much of that money paid for spraying marijuana, as distinct from poppy, is disputed.

Paraquat from the spraying reached marijuana sold in the United States. Its discovery there in 1977 and 1978 led Congress to bar United States aid for spraying marijuana with a herbicide likely to harm the people who smoked it, a ban that took effect in 1979 and was rewritten in 1981. Mexico's share of the American marijuana market fell from the late 1970s and Colombian growers took its place.^: 30 The campaign is one of several described at Herbicide spraying of cannabis.

Before the spraying

In June 1969 a special presidential task force of the government of Richard Nixon reported that Mexico had become "by far our largest supplier of marihuana" and recommended that the State Department persuade Mexico to put the eradication of marijuana among its highest national priorities. In September 1969 the United States launched Operation Intercept at the border to push Mexico into more effective enforcement, and by 10 October the two governments had announced Operation Cooperation, a joint strategy against the production and smuggling of drugs.^: 6 The historian Adela Cedillo writes that Mexico called the joint campaign Operation Canador, from cannabis and adormidera (poppy), until 1975. In her account the army sent about 5,000 soldiers to destroy the crops by hand.^: 6 The United States already wanted the work done with remote sensing and with aircraft spreading herbicides; Cedillo writes that President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz was reluctant to accept it.^: 6

The spraying programme, 1975–1978

The Mexican government began to spray cannabis fields with aqueous paraquat in late 1975 and intensified the programme in 1976. Edgar H. Adams of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) wrote in the early 1980s that Mexico turned to marijuana after its poppy eradication, begun early in 1975 with 2,4-D, had succeeded. In his account the Mexican government chose paraquat from a list, supplied by the United States Department of Agriculture, of herbicides licensed as safe for domestic commercial use.

Trizo and the names of the campaign

The DEA called the campaign Trizo, from the three zones it covered; the first, Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango, was the area called the Golden Triangle. Historians name and date the Mexican side differently. The political scientist Carlos A. Pérez Ricart writes that in Mexico this campaign was called Operation Canador. Cedillo treats Canador as the name of the manual campaign that ended in 1975 and Trizo as its successor, whose first phase ended on 15 April 1976 and whose second ran from early September to late November 1976.^: 8

Trizo used Bell 206 and Bell 212 helicopters to carry Mexican troops to the fields. Cedillo calls the spraying of herbicides its most significant innovation. Contract pilots and Mexican pilots flew the spraying missions, while DEA agents and pilots flew reconnaissance to judge the results.^: 8 In Pérez Ricart's account a typical mission used two helicopters: one sprayed while the other pointed out the fields, guarded the spray ship and carried fuel and herbicide. Most of the spraying took place in the first zone, the old poppy country. From January 1976 aircraft sprayed poppy fields with chemicals. The DEA agents in Mexico were paid for by the United States International Narcotics Control Program and accompanied Mexican federal police on reconnaissance and on missions to verify the destruction of poppy and marijuana fields. The contract pilots came from the Evergreen company and had flown in Vietnam and in the Golden Triangle of South-east Asia. Cedillo notes, citing the historian Jonathan Marshall, that Evergreen International Aviation put George Doole, head of the Central Intelligence Agency's air operations until 1971, on its board in 1975.^: 8

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) told a Senate subcommittee in May 1978 that the programme had relied since late 1975 on paraquat and 2,4-D applied by helicopter and that an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 marijuana fields and about 80,000 poppy fields had been sprayed in 1976 and 1977.

Operation Condor

In the last months of their terms, Presidents Luis Echeverría and Gerald Ford agreed on a larger joint operation that kept up the aerial spraying and the manual destruction of crops. The DEA, which went on supplying people, equipment and money, still called it Trizo; in Mexico it was code-named Condor. It divided the country into 13 zones and began with an attack on Zone VI, the Golden Triangle, where more than 20,000 highlanders were said to grow 70 per cent of the country's marijuana and poppy.^: 8–9 The operation and its base at Badiraguato are described at Sierra Madre Occidental.

In 1978 the Mexican government ended the DEA's part in the operation.^: 26–27 Pérez Ricart writes that the DEA's work then passed to the Narcotics Assistance Unit, a group of 14 employees under the deputy chief of mission of the United States embassy. From April 1978 an American firm, Aviation Associates International, flew surveillance under a United States–Mexican contract to check the results of the spraying.^: 27 For fiscal year 1987 the United States allocated $15.5 million to the programme.^: 1

Who paid for spraying marijuana

The sources disagree on whether the United States paid for spraying cannabis, or only poppy.

• NORML told the Senate in 1978 that since 1973 the United States had given Mexico more than $50 million and had helped it to develop, set up and run the eradication programme.
• At the same hearing the Attorney General of New Mexico, Toney Anaya, passed on what Mexico's attorney general had told him: that Mexico regarded the programme as "totally a Mexican-run, Mexican-funded eradication effort".
• A 1983 epidemiological study traced paraquat in American marijuana to "an aerial spraying program in Mexico, supported indirectly by United States funds".
• Pérez Ricart writes that the administration of Jimmy Carter argued that it was paying for the spraying of opium poppy fields and not marijuana.
• In a 1992 RAND study for the Department of Defense, the Mexican programme was "based on U.S.-supported aerial spraying", but Washington pressed only for the spraying of opium fields. Mexico chose to spray the marijuana fields too, because it feared that marijuana would come into wide use at home.^: 20

Paraquat in American marijuana

In June 1977 NIDA asked Carlton E. Turner and his colleagues to look into paraquat in marijuana. They tested 160 kilogram bricks of confiscated marijuana and found paraquat in 20, or 12.5 per cent; none of the samples seized before 20 October 1976 carried it. In March 1978, 13 of 61 marijuana samples from the south-western United States, 21 per cent, were contaminated with paraquat. The contamination was traced to the Mexican spraying. Cedillo writes that American researchers feared that up to a quarter of the Mexican marijuana entering the country was contaminated.^: 26

Adams explains the contamination by the growers' response to the spraying: paraquat killed a plant faster than any herbicide then available, but farmers protected their investment by harvesting the crop before it died. The sprayed marijuana went to market. Reports of contaminated marijuana led early in 1978 to what Adams calls a "media blitz", including stories that the federal government was poisoning marijuana smokers on purpose. Cedillo notes the same accusation among conspiracy theorists. She also records the warnings of Mexican researchers that the herbicide could contaminate food crops and water.^: 26

The Percy amendment

The International Security Assistance Act of 1978, signed on 26 September 1978, added a subsection to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. It provided that narcotics-control assistance "may not be made available or used for any program involving the spraying of a herbicide to eradicate marihuana plants if the use of that herbicide is likely to cause serious harm to the health of persons who may use or consume the sprayed marihuana". The bar did not apply if the herbicide was used with another substance that would warn users that the marijuana had been sprayed. NIDA and the House narcotics committee called the provision the Percy amendment.^: 126

In the spring of 1978 NORML asked a federal court for an injunction against further United States involvement in the spraying; its director, Keith Stroup, told the Senate subcommittee on 9 May 1978 that Judge Joseph Waddy had heard the arguments the week before and had taken the case under advisement. On 28 June 1979 the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control heard evidence on the health effects. A computer simulation by the Centers for Disease Control estimated that 50 to 100 smokers in the south-west each year would inhale enough paraquat to risk lung damage. On 2 August 1979 the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Joseph Califano, wrote to the Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, about the health risk of sprayed marijuana. That letter brought the funding bar into force. Adams writes that the provision came to be read as barring United States money from any part of a herbicide campaign against marijuana.

The International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1981 replaced the bar on 29 December 1981. The new text required the Secretary of State to tell the Secretary of Health and Human Services whenever a country receiving narcotics-control assistance used or intended to use a herbicide on marijuana. It urged the President to spend at least $100,000 developing a substance that would warn smokers that marijuana had been sprayed "with the herbicide paraquat or other herbicide harmful to the health of such persons". The House committee called the change a repeal. By then it held that paraquat was "the most effective and environmentally safe herbicide for use in marihuana eradication programs", and that the federal estimate of harm rested on "worst case" assumptions.^: 126–127

Effects on growers and the trade

Cedillo cites an anonymous informer of the federal attorney general's office and judicial police, interviewed by the journalist Anabel Hernández, who said that growers who paid a "drug tax" to the security forces could mark their fields with coloured flags, so that the helicopters sprayed them with water. In Cedillo's reading the evidence of mass extortion supports the claim, but dozens of growers did have their crops defoliated. The press reported peasants shooting at the helicopters to defend their fields. She notes that the monitoring flights could not have caught crops sprayed with water if the pilots knew which fields to spare.^: 26–27 Officials of the Badiraguato municipal council told her in 2017 that they had never heard of ecological damage, or of land made useless, by the spraying in their municipality.^: 26

The General Accounting Office reported that the eradication of 1977 to 1980, helped by poor weather, sharply cut the Mexican marijuana and heroin available in the United States. By 1982 Mexican marijuana was only 6 per cent of the American market, about 750 tonnes; by 1986 Mexico's share of imported marijuana had recovered to 37 per cent, more than 3,000 tonnes.^: 2–3 The RAND study suggests that the fall in Mexican marijuana may have owed as much to American buyers avoiding it for fear of paraquat.^: 20 A later GAO report gives both causes, eradication and the reluctance of American users to buy marijuana that might carry paraquat, and reports that Colombian producers filled the gap: by 1981, 79 per cent of the marijuana consumed in the United States came from Colombia.^: 30 Colombia's own spraying programme is described at Herbicide spraying in Colombia.

In 1983 Mexico lent aircraft and pilots to spray cannabis with paraquat in Belize. That campaign is described at Herbicide spraying in Belize.

Map

Eradication event locations

Timeline

	Date	Category	Event	State	Locality
News:1977-01-16/Eradication/operation-condor-against-drug-crops-begins-in-culiacán-with-a-military-parade	16 January 1977	Eradication	Operation Condor against drug crops begins in Culiacán with a military parade	Sinaloa	Culiacán

See also

• Carlton E. Turner
• Herbicide spraying in Belize
• Herbicide spraying in Colombia
• Herbicide spraying in the United States
• Herbicide spraying of cannabis
• Mexico
• Sierra Madre Occidental
• United States and cannabis eradication abroad