Carlos A. Pérez Ricart

Political scientist whose archival work is the most rigorous account of how US drug enforcement agencies — first the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, then the DEA — shaped the Mexican anti-narcotics apparatus from within between 1940 and 1980. Working with recently declassified documents, Pérez Ricart traces the size, nature, and geography of US agency involvement in Mexico through the Camarena era.

His central argument refuses the simple binary of US imposition versus Mexican agency: Mexico’s punitive drug policy was shaped by US pressure, but also by local elites’ desire to expand state authority over peripheral regions, by a repressive colonial-era tradition toward psychoactive substances, and by racism toward indigenous and foreign consumers. Pérez Ricart has also demonstrated that during the Dirty War (1969–78), federal elites used the discretionary powers enabled by the war on drugs to repress student activists, revolutionary peasants, and other “internal enemies” — a finding central to the state-crime co-constitution thesis.