United States

The United States is both a destination and an instrument of power in the novel: its market makes cross-border transport extraordinarily profitable, while its roads, institutions, and border become sites where cartel operations and law enforcement contest control. The country is not simply the other side of a line. Its economic connections with Mexico help create the trafficking system, and the boundary’s practical permeability shapes who can move, trade, and claim legal authority.

A Cross-Border Social World

For Tijuana’s wealthy families, the United States is woven into life well before the characters enter the drug trade. In the late 1960s, many parents arranged for their children to be born in San Diego so they could acquire dual citizenship. Fabián Martínez and his peers attended preschool together in Tijuana’s Hipódromo neighborhood, then moved with their mothers to San Diego for middle and high school. Their families treated the two cities as parts of one business community despite the national border between them.

The young people’s routines sustained that connection. Fabián and his friends attended Augustine High School in San Diego, while their sisters went to Our Lady of Peace; weekdays in the United States alternated with weekends in Tijuana, Rosarito, and Ensenada. Schooling, language, and social contacts across the border gave this affluent group a thoroughly transnational footing. The United States appears here not as a distant foreign country but as a familiar extension of a regional elite’s social and commercial world.

The Border as a Drug-Trafficking Asset

The novel presents the border itself as a key source of the Federación’s power. Operation Condor was intended to suppress Sinaloan drug production, but its effects included dispersing the organization and encouraging a shift toward moving contraband across the long United States–Mexico boundary. The Federación’s early arrangement with the Medellín Cartel and Cali Group paid the Mexicans $1,000 for each kilo safely delivered inside the United States. Instead of concentrating on growing drugs, the Mexicans received cocaine from the Colombians, moved it to border staging areas, carried it across, and handed it back for processing. The product could then reach American streets within weeks, or sometimes days, of leaving Colombia.

The arrangement later changed from paid delivery to direct participation in sales. Under Adán Barrera, the Federación sought to buy cocaine wholesale from its Colombian suppliers and handle retail distribution itself, ending the former per-kilo delivery fee. The border remained central to both models: it separated markets where the same product could command radically different prices, but its crossings and transport networks also connected those markets. As the novel’s account emphasizes, the value lay not only in the drug but in the capacity to move it across the boundary.

Routes, Cash, and Ordinary Infrastructure

The United States’ roads and crossings serve as working infrastructure for the trade. Raúl Barrera’s entry-level assignment for Fabián was to drive a Ford Explorer through Otay Mesa at a specified time and in a specified lane. Fabián crossed without being stopped, reached an arranged address, exchanged vehicles with two men, and returned to Tijuana. Raúl then paid him $10,000 in American cash. The episode turns an ordinary border crossing into a practical demonstration of how easily routine traffic could be recruited into smuggling.

Fabián later advanced to a larger arrangement: taking delivery of fifty kilos from a fishing boat at Rosarito and transporting them across the border for $1,000 per kilo, with $100 per kilo going to Raúl for protection. The route linked maritime delivery on the Mexican coast to movement through the United States, while the payment structure made the border crossing a source of profit at every stage.

The network also used less protected terrain. Coyote Canyon, beside a rickety fence near Tijuana, is described as a route where large groups of would-be migrants could overwhelm the relatively small Border Patrol presence at night. The same terrain was dangerous: armed bandits preyed on people attempting the crossing. The canyon therefore makes visible the uneven distribution of risk along the border: migrants, smugglers, and law enforcement moved through a shared space, but with sharply different resources and vulnerabilities.

Political and Financial Leverage

The United States is connected to the Federación’s influence over Mexican politics as well as its trafficking routes. Four years before the later political bargain described in the novel, the opposition candidate Cárdenas appeared likely to defeat the long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party. The vote-counting computers then malfunctioned, and Adán learns that the Federación had helped the president steal the election. The organization’s power thus reaches beyond bribery or transport: it has become entangled with the political arrangements determining who governs Mexico.

That leverage also takes a financial form. After a new Mexican president took office on December 1, 1994, brokerage houses controlled by the Federación began buying government tesobonos the next day. The following week, the cartels withdrew capital from the Mexican national bank, helping force a 50 percent devaluation of the peso. They then cashed in their bonds as the economy collapsed. By moving between dollars and devalued pesos, the organization was able to buy assets cheaply and profit as their value recovered after the American bailout.

The new president invited the drug lords to return their money to Mexico to help revive the economy. Adán accepted, but demanded a favorable environment for trade, meaning that public declarations against the cartels could not be matched by effective action against them. The novel links this bargain to appointments of politicians named on an American list of officials on the Federación’s payroll, including governors, a transportation secretary, and the head of the national drug-control institute. Political authority, cartel money, and international financial intervention converge in an arrangement that leaves the organization more powerful.

Jurisdiction and the Limits of the Line

Cross-border enforcement exposes a different dimension of the United States’ role: the border can be treated as an obstacle, a route, or a line whose authority is forcibly disputed. At Coyote Canyon, Art Keller’s group arranges a meeting at the fence and arrests Quito Fuentes for the murder of Ernie Hidalgo. Quito insists that he is in Mexico; Art pulls him through a cut in the fence into the United States. A Border Patrol agent sees the seizure but turns away. The scene makes the boundary’s legal significance inseparable from the practical question of who controls the crossing and who chooses to intervene.

Art’s capture of Ramón Mette in Honduras extends that conflict far beyond the United States’ border. After Mette is seized, he is taken by plane to the Dominican Republic, arrested for Hidalgo’s murder at the American embassy, flown to San Diego, arraigned, denied bail, and held in solitary confinement. The operation provokes riots in Tegucigalpa, including the burning of the American embassy, and raises objections in Washington as well. The United States is therefore presented as a source of prosecution and institutional reach, but also as an actor whose extraterritorial enforcement creates diplomatic consequences.

The country’s ordinary highways also become part of high-stakes movement. During Nora Hayden’s drive north with several million dollars in her car, she passes through San Diego and continues along the route past La Jolla, Del Mar, and Oceanside before stopping just south of Camp Pendleton. Barrera gunmen remain nearby to guard the vehicle while she briefly leaves it. The routine details of a rest stop and a vending-machine purchase sit beside the concealed security operation, showing how the same American road system that carries everyday traffic can also host a clandestine transfer of cartel money.