ABSTRACT
The White House, which claimed that abusers committed many serious crimes, vowed to stanch the influx of narcotics. Congress assigned responsibility for enforcement to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and the chief executive renamed his strategy a "total war" on heroin and a "crusade to save our children." In 1973 the Drug Enforcement Administration was born as the entity with prime responsibility for narcotic matters. Drug dealers behaved discretely, showed deference to public figures, spurned kidnapping, appeared with governors at their children's weddings, and, although often allergic to politics, helped the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) discredit its opponents by linking them to narco-trafficking. Mexico was beginning a twenty-five-year period of robust growth, formidable industrialization, and political stability under the PRI's temporal and authoritarian church. If conditions remained the same or worsened, the state executive would receive a phone call from the secretary of interior—the revolutionary church's political consiglieri—and sometimes even directly from within Los Pinos.
