Lazcano describes how the mob would scour the streets to hunt Chinese. Finding their victims, he writes, they would drag them to a clandestine jail in a shuttered-up house and keep them prisoner with their arms and legs bound. When they had enough captives, they would pack them into boxcars, put them on cargo trains, and ship them out of state. Sinaloans then took over the Chinese homes and property. The ethnic cleansing in Sinaloa came as the Nazi regime was persecuting Jews in Europe. Lazcano didn't miss the comparison.
Grillo describes the process of how lynch mobs in Mexico pushing Chinese populace out of the country by a process of imprisonment and commandeering of property.
'We have seen the films of the brutal repression that the Jews were subjected to and scenes of how they were transported like animals. Well, the same thing happened in Sinaloa, but with the Chinese. Seeing the images in real life was overwhelming.'
Lazcano describes the xenophobic lynch mobs of Mexico and their treatment of the Chinese as similar to the Holocaust.
Elsewhere, Mexican gangsters didn't bother with boxcars; they simply shot dead Chinese rivals. In Ciudad Juarez, a gunman known as El Veracruz is reported to have rounded up and murdered eleven Chinese men working in the opium trade. His boss was allegedly a woman from Durango called Ignacia Jasso, or La Nacha. Mexicans began to dominate the drug trade from the opium-growing Sierra Madre to the bubbling border cities.
The lynch mobs were a direct attempt at a hostile takeover by native Mexican drug operations.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has been compared to the Soviet Communist Party for its grip on power, ruling Mexico almost as long the Bolsheviks ran Russia. It also credited with giving Mexico the longest period of peace in its history and shielding it from the turbulent conflicts that wracked South America throughout the twentieth Century.
Grillo even comments on the politics of the country. As a Texan, we learned very little about this period in Mexican history.
The notion that the US government systematically brought Sinaloan opium during the Second World War is the classic conspiracy theory in the early Mexican drug trade. In today's Sinaloa, politicians, police, and drug traffickers all talk about such a deal as pure fact. The Mexican Defense Department also describes it in its official history of the drug trade printed on the wall at its Mexico City headquarters. However, US officials vehemently denied the deal at the time.
This came as a complete surprise to me. I can almost believe it based on the ingredients supply chain for morphine, a vital battle drug throughout World War II.
An American journalist visited Sinaloa in 1950 and found that sources in business and local government all confirmed the pact. He wrote an inquirty about it to the US federal Bureau of Narcotics, the agency created in 1930 to better coordinate American antidrug efforts. The FBN's director forits first thirty-two years was Harry Anslinger, a hard line drug warrior. Anslinger responded personally to inquiries about the pact, saying the theory is 'utterly fantastic and goes beyond the wildest imagination.'
