Mexican Army

The Mexican Army is portrayed as a force deployed in the name of drug suppression whose activities extend from destroying poppy-growing villages to guarding the infrastructure used by traffickers. Across these episodes, the novel sets the Army’s public role in enforcement and security against the ways military capacity is redirected, contested, or made useful to other powers.

Operation Condor and the poppy campaign

The Army’s most direct campaign appears in the Sinaloan mountains near Badiraguato, where the American War on Drugs has opened a front. Ten thousand Mexican Army troops move through the valley alongside the Municipal Judicial Federal Police and a small group of Drug Enforcement Administration advisers, including Art Keller. Most soldiers travel on foot; some ride horseback. Their orders are to poison poppy fields and destroy what remains, in an effort to attack the source of the heroin reaching American cities. The scale and organization of the operation make it a military campaign as well as a drug-enforcement measure.

The setting explains why the operation is concentrated there. The Sierra Occidental has a combination of altitude, rainfall, and soil conditions especially suited to growing the opium poppy. The target is not simply a field or a shipment but an agricultural base embedded in a rural region. Yet the force described in the novel is directed at the landscape and the people living in it, not only at the large organizations believed to control the trade.

That distinction becomes visible as the campaign enters villages. Soldiers set fire to thatched roofs and break adobe walls while searching the settlement. At another village, campesinos watch from the roadside as troops prepare to burn their homes; young soldiers hold them back from retrieving their belongings. The account emphasizes the ordinary residents caught within the operation’s path. Its immediate burden falls on communities whose homes and possessions are placed at risk, even as the drug agents accompanying the campaign complain that the arrests have reached small operators rather than major traffickers.

Enforcement and the limits of the campaign

The operation’s stated purpose is to eliminate the poppy supply, but the novel also depicts disagreement over whom the campaign is reaching. DEA advisers are frustrated by the capture of small-time suspects and press Lieutenant Navarres to pursue higher-level figures. They imply that he knows where those figures are and is deliberately leading them elsewhere. Navarres is caught between their demands and an operation that has so far failed to capture prominent targets, including García Abrego, Chalino Guzmán, Jaime Herrera, and Rafael Caro.

This contrast complicates the apparent simplicity of a large military sweep. The troops can move through valleys and settlements and destroy crops and houses, but that reach does not automatically produce access to the leaders sought by the advisers. The novel juxtaposes the visible force applied to rural communities with the continued elusiveness of major traffickers. The result is an enforcement effort that can be extensive in its effects on villages while remaining incomplete against the hierarchy it intends to dismantle.

Security around political power

The Army also appears in a different security setting during Luis Donaldo Colosio’s campaign stop in Lomas Taurinas, a poor neighborhood near Tijuana. Colosio is surrounded by plainclothes members of the elite presidential guard, while a special team of former Tijuana police officers provides local security. On the slope above the crowd, Ramos has positioned his Special Tactical Group. The novel identifies General Reyes as commander of the Army guard and as a senior figure in the presidential bodyguard, distinguishing this protective apparatus from the local police team.

The scene turns on a disagreement over who is responsible for Colosio’s safety. When he decides to leave the pickup truck and walk among the crowd, Ramos warns that the move will make protection impossible. Reyes dismisses the local officer’s authority, insisting that the responsibility belongs to the presidential guard. Colosio hears their exchange and questions the premise that he needs protection from the people. The Army guard is thus part of a layered security arrangement, but the scene also shows how divided authority and competing judgments shape that arrangement. The evidence establishes the dispute and the decision to walk; it does not, in this passage, establish the subsequent outcome.

Military capacity in drug logistics and counterinsurgency

The Army’s presence does not always obstruct the drug trade. After the Federation’s financial gains, Adán Barrera builds a fleet of twenty-three Boeing 727s to move cocaine. Planes arrive at civilian airports, military airstrips, and even highways closed and guarded by the Army until the cargo has been unloaded. Refrigerated trucks then carry the cocaine to warehouses near the border, where it is divided into smaller loads and concealed in vehicles for onward delivery. In this account, military security forms part of the transport environment used by the cartel. The novel does not specify the arrangements behind each guarded landing, but the contrast is plain: the institution mobilized against drug production also appears around facilities serving large-scale trafficking.

A later debate over military aid shows another way the drug war can provide a framework for using armed force. John Hobbs describes left-wing insurgencies as a regional security danger, citing the Zapatistas in Chiapas and the emergence of the Popular Revolutionary Army. He argues that Mexico cannot openly accept American military assistance on counterinsurgency grounds, while Congress will fund assistance presented as part of the fight against drugs. Under that rationale, a package of seventy-five Huey helicopters and twelve C-26 aircraft, ostensibly funded to combat traffickers, is to be transferred quietly to the Mexican Army for use in Chiapas and Guerrero.

The distinction matters: this is a proposed transfer described in a political discussion, not evidence that the Army has already carried out the operations in question. Hobbs’s argument makes the War on Drugs a usable public rationale for assistance whose intended application is counterinsurgency. Read beside the troop sweeps in Sinaloa and the guarded airstrips used by cocaine traffickers, the episode places the Army within a contested landscape where anti-drug enforcement, political security, and military policy overlap. The novel does not reduce those roles to a single motive; it shows how the same institution can be deployed against one part of the drug economy, implicated in the protection of another part’s logistics, and selected as the recipient of military resources for a different stated objective.