José Amarillas. Mexican Opium

Drug trafficking in Mexico has an origin. 3141 kms. of border (today about 3180) with the USA. A line that crosses swamps, deserts, mountains, small towns and big cities. But who planted the opium that today makes Mexico the third largest producer in the world? Going deeper into history, this is a sample of what I found…

Beginnings of the legislation

In the 19th century, the moral and political precepts that accompany the puritanical tradition of the colonizers, or WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) who blamed the scourge of the drug on other ethnic groups (Chinese and opium, blacks and cocaine, Mexicans and marijuana …), although they were the main consumers.

In 1906, in the Opium Convention, USA decided to extend the cause beyond its borders, which hid a campaign of extortion to the producing and distributing countries. In the Hague Conference in 1911, two years before, Mexico prohibits the illicit cultivation of marijuana and poppy.

In that year of 1911 arrives Lai Chang Wong to Sinaloa. He had rushed out of Hong Kong, where he had been born in 1869, pursued by his uncle’s saber. He had made his aunt pregnant and, although she took the blame, her uncle did not sheathe the sword.

He enlisted as a cook on a ship bound for America. He arrived in S. Francisco, where he began to work in a pharmacy, since he read many medical books in Hong Kong. When he heard about the Mexican Revolution, he went to Sinaloa, where he became a doctor in the Northwest Revolutionary Army.

Ten years later he left the service with a bullet in his right leg, which remains crippled. He set up a naturist practice in El Dorado (Sinaloa), where he had a vegetable garden where he planted everything, plus a small flower that he used for ointments. There he converted to Catholicism with the name of José Amarillas, the same name of the priest who baptized him.

Prohibitive laws

Meanwhile, in 1914, the Harrison Act outlawed the consumption of marijuana, opium and cocaine in the United States. With the prohibition of crops in Mexico, a few quiet years pass until it is dictated in the USA in 1919, the Dry Law. It causes much impact in the neighboring countries and the Mexican “coyotes” recover the routes and create new ones to introduce alcohols in Gringoland. Most pass through the port of Mazatlan.

During the Mexican Revolution, the government tried to ban drugs and alcohol, and even made a law in 1923, but many governors and revolutionaries refused to comply.
In the early 1930s, Juan Nepomuceno Guerra would found the pioneer of the Cartels, the Gulf Cartel.

In El Dorado, Amarillas made a lot of money and liked the game very much. On a lucky night, after plucking his friends, and wanting them to recover, he had to hide and soon after he had an office in S. José de la Puerta, in the municipality of Badiraguato.

He mated with a neighbour with whom he had 4 children, but he left her shortly afterwards and by 1927 he was already living in Badiraguato. He met a mountain woman, Jesusita and, according to oral tradition, he fell in love with her as a “Mexican male”. I can’t imagine a chinese guy and a limp with one leg, appearing at dusk.
in the house of Jesusa, on horseback and with a bottle of tequila in his hand. He put the icing on the cake hiring a “tambora”, that is, a group of rancheras that played their favorite song…
“White Horse”. Impossible to refuse it, Jesusita married and gave him 12 children. He used to call her “Chuy- vieja”.

José Amarillas, healer

Lai, now José Amarillas, had 48 children. For a Chinese opium smoker, it’s not bad at all… The Sinaloans were delighted with a guy who didn’t touch the scalpel, consulted medical books before operating, studied the trajectories of bullets and extracted them by sucking them out…

But at that time anti-Chinese nationalist sentiments were growing and he prepared for a possible escape. Helped by the governor, he was disguised as a “Chinese muleteer” to Chihuahua and had the “luck” to find an outbreak of black pox that kept him alive by treatments for the skin he prepared by boiling cowhots and applying to smallpox wounds.

After the anti-Chinese campaign, around 1934, he returned to Badiraguato on horseback, with his wife, loaded with money with which the band of rancheras paid while sucking on tequilas and falling in love with girls.

World War II

Meanwhile, in Europe, Hitler closed the doors of Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, the big suppliers of heroin of the USA through the clans of Marseilles that purified the drug. So, the USA fixes itself on Mexico. And they come to a pact (not recognized by any of the countries) for the search of appropriate territories for the cultivation of poppy.

And here we find Mr. Amarillas, a man chosen by the commission led by Meyer Lansky, a Jewish mafioso of Belarusian origin (a great friend of “Lucky Luciano” and of Batista, the Cuban president) to choose the most appropriate territories for the cultivation of opium poppy.
land. Amarillas had seed, contacts to get it in quantity and had already cultivated in Sinaloa.
He also recruits men of air, with open tomb and discreet. He points to the mountains of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, the later called “Golden Triangle”.

Mafias

At the end of the war, it becomes de facto illegal and the U.S. resumes its usual anti-drug policy. But in exchange for the services rendered during the war, the CIA (which collects Lansky’s witness) allows the mafia to sell heroin in New York and the big American cities, but only in the black neighborhoods.

In 1948, Mexico began the first campaign to eradicate illegal crops in the “Golden Triangle. This causes the old mafias, like the Italian ones, to retake control of the European and Asian heroin trafficking routes in the USA.

The Myth

Meanwhile, Amarillas remained in Badiguarato, and people made pilgrimages from miles to their consultation and even healed the tattered ones for free. And he also supported his 48 children! At the age of 79, he decided to retire and move with Chepe, one of his sons, to Jesús María, on the border between Culiacán and Badiraguato, where he died in 1953.

This man, already dead, bears the guilt of opium cultivation in Mexico and the birth of a new illicit business towards the U.S.O., which they see as an infiltrator of a communist country within the country of the defenders of the free world. And the Italian mafia through… and Hitler…, the Byelorussian Jews… and all this in Sinaloa… this stew carries LSD? How many unanswered questions…