Mexico City May Open Museum on Drug War

With exhibits of bottled crack cocaine, a marijuana-filled turnover and a photo of a woman’s cocaine-implanted buttocks, Maj. Cipriano Cruz doesn’t doubt his museum could attract visitors. He just doesn’t know if he wants to open it to the public.

For 15 years, the Defense Ministry has been home to what is being touted as one of Mexico City’s most intriguing, if secret, exhibitions: Its “Narco Museum.”

Filled with confiscated opium laboratories, high-tech law-evading gear and impressive weaponry used by drug smugglers, the one-room gallery tucked away on the second floor of the ministry is used to show narcotics agents and soldiers what they will face when they are sent out to the drug war’s front lines.

But since a Mexican television news program featured the museum, Cruz has been flooded with requests for tours from the public--so much so that the ministry is studying the possibility of opening it.

The administrator worries the museum will attract not only the curious but also smugglers looking to survey the methods of their fellow felons. “We’re afraid if we open this to the public it might give them ideas,” Cruz said.

Officially called the Mind-Altering Substances Museum, the exhibition hall displays the ways smugglers sneak drugs past the authorities.

Among the modes of transport on view are a blond, drug-stuffed doll that was carried by a child, a doughnut sprinkled with poppy seeds that were to be made into heroin, a tasty-looking turnover stuffed with marijuana, and a fiberglass surfboard that was filled with drugs.

On a nearby wall are two gruesome photos: one picturing a doctor’s hands holding up bloody packets of cocaine, another showing the black-and-blue buttocks from which the packages were removed.

The Colombian woman slipped through security at Mexico City’s international airport carrying 4.4 pounds of cocaine inside her when she suddenly felt sick and rushed to the airport’s emergency services for help, Cruz said. She died of an overdose after one of the packets burst.

Despite such shocking displays and the possible help to felons, Cruz acknowledges there would be advantages to allowing public access.

It could help win empathy for Mexico’s embattled anti-drug forces by showing people just how hard it is to fight this war, he said.

At the entrance, a flame flickers beside a wall of plaques listing the names of 380 soldiers--including two generals--who have died while battling the drug trade since 1976.

Inside is a sampling of confiscated weapons, ranging from a crude, handmade wooden gun with six metal barrels that must be fired manually to a full-powered rocket launcher used against naval ships.

With President Vicente Fox campaigning to urge Mexicans to take part in fighting crime by reporting it, opening up the museum would help ordinary people learn what to look for.

Cruz concedes not every smuggler is the same. But he says they often have things in common--such as statues of Jesus Malverde, an outlaw hanged in 1909 who may have been one of Mexico’s first marijuana growers and is claimed by today’s smugglers as their unofficial patron saint.

“These are all indicators that people in the area are working in the drug trade,” Cruz said.

The museum also has exhibits on the flamboyant ways drug criminals use to flaunt their riches.

There is a solid wooden door whose ornate carving depicts a farmer guarding a towering marijuana crop with an assault rifle. The door was seized from a smuggler’s home in southern Mexico.

A glass case holds pistols with handles carved with everything from the Virgin of Guadalupe to a palm tree, the latter thought to belong to drug lord Hector Luis Palma, whose last name means Palm.

The gaudiest of all is a .38-caliber pistol studded with emeralds, cubic zirconia and the gold-plated initials “ACF,” which presumably stand for the late drug kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

Standing near the exit is a male mannequin dressed in a silky pink-and-purple polyester shirt, draped in thick gold chains and topped with a towering cowboy hat.

“That’s the classic dress of a drug trafficker,” Cruz said.