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Little ethnographic research has been conducted on how the illegal drug trade has affected and transformed rural communities in Mexico and the rest of Mesoamerica. It is a topic that is difficult and potentially dangerous to explore, at least directly; thus it is not surprising that relatively few researchers have openly studied it. For those of us working on rural development problems, it means that our analyses are silent on a critical dimension of the local economy. This paper describes the effects of drug trafficking on a small, rural town in Mexico's central highlands in which a highly interpenetrated legal-illegal economy has emerged. A series of ethnographic vignettes provide the entry point for exploring how the narcoeconomy manifested itself both materially and in the imaginations of local people. An ordinary town, in fact, had extraordinary inequalities: opulent houses; the subversion of traditional forms of leisure; a new urban-oriented consumer culture; and new farmer entrepreneurs. All were underwritten by narco-activities. The paper closes by considering the broader implications of the narcoeconomy by expanding on themes of globalization and poverty, migration, gender, and violence that run through the descriptive vignettes.
Key words: drug trafficking, narcoeconomy, globalization, inequality, culture change, Mexico
Introduction
Since the mid-1980s, the news media has carried dramatic stories about the integration of the illegal narcotics industry into the Mexican political economy. Periodically there are reports of gun battles in Tijuana between warring cartels-Gulf, Tijuana, and Juarez. High profile, drug-related violence has not been uncommon-in 1993 a Cardinal of the Catholic Church was killed in Guadalajara; in 1994 a number of high-ranking politicians were murdered or disappeared; and yet others, such as former drug enforcement task-force chief Eduardo Valle, have come forward detailing the links between top government officials and the drug cartels (Reding 1995; Willoughby 2003).' The illegal narcotics business began to boom in the 198Os as the Colombian cartels' trade routes through the Caribbean became seriously compromised by intensified U.S. surveillance and interdiction. The resultant shift in drug traffic through Central America and Mexico has turned into a multi-billion dollar business (Paternostro 1995:44-45 ; Andreas 1998:160-161 ).2 Though estimates vary, something on the order of 80 percent of the cocaine, 80 percent of the marijuana, and perhaps 30 percent of the heroin...