The Lawman Who Traffics in Betrayal

As an Associated Press reporter on the Mexican border in the mid-’90s, I didn’t need to go far for stories on drugs or corruption, or the unique blend of tragedy and absurdity that typically followed.

But none of the players on the border near Tijuana fascinated me as much as the Mexican lawman. Not the flashy drug kingpins or the granola-eating human rights advocates who stood up to them. Not the local coroner, who, instead of becoming hardened to the sight of death, was so devastated by the bullet-ridden bodies crowding his office that he demanded the death penalty for assassins.

Instead, I always wanted to know about the ordinary cop who wore a badge in a city where laws meant little to drug traffickers. His arrangement, I always thought, must be the most complex of all. He was expected to resist the temptation of easy cash while laboring for a few hundred dollars a month. If he was determined to remain honest, he had to find a small space to live in the crowded culture of plata o plomo (silver or lead).

And invariably I wondered about the changes that took place in the officer’s morality scheme as he deftly walked the thin line between not wanting to know what was going on and keeping his ear to the ground as a way to survive.

So, I was intrigued by the new Steven Soderbergh film “Traffic,” which uses three distinct story lines to illustrate the complexities of the drug-trafficking business. One of the stories follows Javier Rodriguez, a Tijuana police officer played as a brooding, conflicted individualist by Benicio Del Toro.

“He exists in a gray area. We tried to show a man learning,” said Steve Gaghan, who wrote the screenplay. “He’s in the massive, moral confusion of Mexico. He’s somebody who believed in the job. He’s really concerned about the destruction of his hometown. [But] we worked really, really hard to make sure it wasn’t in black and white.”

Rodriguez gropes for truth as versions of modern Mexican drug history unfold around him, and his dilemma becomes discouragingly clear. Even though he hangs back in his snap-button cowboy shirts and low voice, the institutional corruption envelops him.

As the film opens, Rodriguez confiscates a load of cocaine only to be robbed by corrupt federal agents who, before roaring off, take his only pair of handcuffs. The black humor trickles through other scenes, as when a mediocre drug trafficker played by Miguel Ferrer explains to U.S. authorities: “Law enforcement in Mexico is an entrepreneurial activity.”

“Traffic” has already won best picture of the year from the New York Film Critics Circle and received a Golden Globe nomination for best dramatic movie. It is believable and disturbing, but anyone looking for reassurance might want to see another movie.

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I got to the border as a band of brothers reputed to run an ambitious drug business was becoming Mexico’s most violent drug gang. U.S. authorities tagged it the Arellano Felix Organization, or AFO, and its tendrils of power crept from the upscale neighborhoods of Tijuana into the city’s canyon slums and then over the border, into neighborhoods of Southern California.

While most businesses tried to recover from the 1994 peso devaluation, the drug gangs had continued to pay their human mules in U.S. dollars or drugs. In September 1997, the FBI placed Ramon Arellano Felix on its 10 Most Wanted list and tried to entice informants with a $2-million reward.

By this time, health officials were documenting off-the-chart increases in the number of drug addicts among Tijuana’s 1.7 million residents. Some of the addicts told rehab counselors they were former mules. There were so many drug-runners-turned-drug-zombies that former addicts erected unorthodox detox compounds around town. They offered no medical treatment--just tough love and all-day group therapy sessions.

One of my most distinct memories of Tijuana occurred on a Friday night in February 1997, inside the green glass federal police headquarters. Three days earlier, the country’s anti-drug czar, a general with 40 years of military experience, had been accused of accepting bribes from the country’s most powerful drug kingpin.

That night, Baja California’s newly appointed federal prosecutor told a room of U.S. and Mexican reporters that the state’s entire federal police force was being transferred out of the state. The 87 agents equipped with AK-47s who dressed in black and sat nonchalantly in the back of fast-moving Chevy Suburbans would be replaced by 46 soldiers. At first I thought the general said 146 soldiers, but I had forgotten to account for the absurd.

Expressionless, the prosecutor explained that the soldiers’ military training--presumably the same rigors that the anti-drug czar once went through--would make them “more immune” to corruption than their civilian predecessors.

After the news conference, we walked outside, where a group of federal agents loitered near mopeds or stood around the doorway to Interstate Ruta 66, the small diner next door.

I spoke with Javier Chavez, a 28-year-old federal police officer who wore pointed cowboy boots and a leather jacket. He told me he had gone through 18 months of anti-drug-trafficking training and, after a brief posting in Tijuana, had been promoted to squadron commander. He resented the accusations that he and his colleagues were servants of drug kingpins, and he thought the nefarious reputation of federal agents was unfounded--or at least embellished.

Chavez and the rest of Baja’s federal police were about to be flown to Mexico City, where they would submit to drug testing and a debriefing before their reassignment somewhere in Mexico. When Chavez and his colleagues were told the prosecutor thought the soldiers would be more immune to corruption, there were plenty of smirks and awkward cigarette smoking.

“Maybe the military boys will be deaf, too,” an agent next to Chavez grumbled. “That would help.” The officers got on their mopeds or piled into cars across the street. The diner’s door remained open. I never saw them again.

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Now, almost four years later, I see Rodriguez in “Traffic.” He is only one version of the hundreds of cops in Tijuana, enforcing the law of the land--whatever that may be. But, much to my relief, “Traffic” gives us a character who is up close, in focus and unapologetically flawed.

In a San Diego hotel room, Rodriguez looks to sell out his countrymen to U.S. Drug Enforcement agents. They pat him on the back and reassure him that he’s doing the right thing, but he’s well beyond solace.

“I feel like a traitor,” he says.

In nearly every scene in “Traffic,” Rodriguez has to lie. And even a small mission of mercy to his partner’s widow only serves to draw attention to his own isolation. Rodriguez invents a heroic story about his partner’s death, but the story is transparent to her. She would like to be able to believe it, she says, but she doesn’t.

Across the border, when two DEA agents ask him where he would feel safe talking to them, Rodriguez allows himself a small amount of fun. He leads them to a crowded public swimming pool and floats in chest-high water. For at least one moment, he seems weightless and far from danger, even though the substance of their conversation is deadly.

Most gripping for me was a wordless scene that attained a level of reality that I was unable to access as a reporter. Rodriguez, the lone Mexican lawman, sits in his truck and realizes he must decide whom to betray: himself, his colleagues or the murderous drug gangs. It is understood that each betrayal promises fresh, dangerous consequences and more isolation.

In this story line of “Traffic,” Soderbergh allowed Rodriguez to be as unknowable as he needed to be to survive in Tijuana. It’s precisely the same reason I didn’t believe the film’s other two story lines--the ones featuring Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Their characters possessed artificial flourishes, making them too conveniently heroic or villainous, too easy to figure out.

But Rodriguez was just a guy trying to shake free the underworld’s grasp. There were never any clear answers on the border, and there aren’t in the fictional life of Javier Rodriguez.