Drug smuggling

Drug and Migrant Smuggling Across the US-Mexico Border: An Interview With Natalia Mendoza

When it comes to policy issues at the center of the U.S.-Mexico relationship, drug trafficking and migrant smuggling are near the top of the list. Yet while President Trump is happy to make off-the-cuff comments about criminal aliens or dangerous drug traffickers, it’s much rarer to hear from people who have viewed these issues from the field.

Seeking to add an expert perspective to the debate, I reached out to Natalia Mendoza, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Fordham University. She spent years living in the important smuggling hotspot of Altar in the Mexican state of Sonora while conducting ethnographic fieldwork on drug and migrant smuggling. Located along the Pacific Coast, it is the stopover point from drugs and people moving north from Sinaloa before crossing into the Arizona desert.

In this interview with Lawfare, Natalia describes how Altar’s community initially viewed drug trafficking and how the smuggling dynamics and business models evolved and centralized over the last decade. Today, the mafia “bureaucracies” and permanent militias present in Altar and other parts of Mexico control broad swaths of Mexican territory. Yet even as the conditions that led to their creation change, these groups show no signs of disappearing.