California Operations Put a Face on Minority Gains at DEA

Michele Leonhart remembers when she was starting out as a federal drug agent. Dope dealers weren’t expecting women, and she successfully played all kinds of undercover roles, from diplomat’s daughter to troubled young woman.

Errol Chavez and Stephen Delgado remember bloody shootouts with Mexican drug traffickers early in their careers. Chavez recalls a time in Colombia when dealers killed six of his informants over two years, tossing the severed tongue of one of them onto his backyard patio.

Now they are the three top federal drug agents in California, running the main offices of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco.

That’s a milestone. This is 2002, of course, and women, Latinos and other minorities started making advances in business and government long ago. But the DEA was a tougher nut to crack.

Latinos in the DEA began to organize for better treatment in the late 1970s, filed a class-action lawsuit against the agency in the early 1980s and then waited almost a decade before seeing changes they sought in promotions and work assignments.

Women agents never faced quite the same battles, Leonhart says, partly because they blended in on surveillance assignments and were viewed as a valuable asset. But they were talking lawsuit, too, at one point.

To have high-profile offices led by people other than white males “gives new perspective,” said Leonhart, who leads the Los Angeles office, third-largest in the nation with about 300 agents.

“It’s very important to have two Latinos heading two of our most important offices in a state where there is so much drug trafficking from Mexico,” she added.

Of her own success, Leonhart said: “I know there’s a difference when I talk to mothers or to a classroom, and the questions turn to what I did to make it. I see myself as a role model for women in law enforcement.”

Leonhart became the first woman to head a DEA division office in 1997 when she was appointed chief in San Francisco. A year later she took over in Los Angeles.

Leonhart, 46, grew up in Minnesota, the oldest of seven children. From early in elementary school, she wanted to be in law enforcement.

She graduated from college in 1978 with a degree in criminal justice and began to discover that some doors were closed to her.

“I was trying to enter law enforcement at a very interesting time for women,” Leonhart said. “The difficulties hit home when I applied to St. Paul [police] and flunked the upper-body strength test. I was a jock, and I couldn’t imagine being more fit.”

Her next move was to send out 200 to 300 letters to police departments around the country. Baltimore showed interest, did not require an upper-body strength test and hired her.

“I can’t really say I was ever discriminated against, but the attitude in Baltimore was always that I had to prove myself,” she said.

After two years, Leonhart was assigned to assist some DEA raids in Baltimore. And she loved it. In 1980, she graduated top in her DEA class and was given her choice of assignments. She picked Minneapolis “because I wanted to do something for the community where I was raised.”

After five years in Minneapolis, Leonhart was assigned to be a recruiter in St. Louis, then a group supervisor in San Diego, then to a series of management jobs.

“I have never felt unappreciated,” she said, although she knows it was harder for women at the beginning of her career than it is now.

“Last year the number of women agents in the DEA was up to 8%,” she said. “That’s one big change.”

Chavez, who has run the San Diego DEA office since 1995, grew up in New Mexico, the son of a state police official.

He joined the DEA when it was still the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1971. Chavez says he had no idea what discrimination was until the DEA assigned him to Denver in the early 1970s.

“Hispanic agents were called on to help other agents with translating, a lot of ‘gofer’ work,” he said.

“I started helping other agents at that point, and that’s when I started hearing cracks. On expenses, I was told to eat beans, that Mexicans eat cheap.”

A tough street agent, Chavez was one of three DEA agents in a 1974 shootout with 20 Mexican marijuana traffickers outside Mazatlan. A Mexican federal agent and seven drug dealers were killed and one DEA agent was wounded.

Starting in 1981, Chavez served two years as agent in charge of the DEA’s office in Medellin, Colombia. It was his first management job; he had one other agent to supervise, plus a network of informants.

As he moved up within the DEA, Chavez also became increasingly involved in internal battles being fought by Latino agents.

A past chairman of the DEA’s Hispanic Advisory Committee, he has also been active nationally in Latino law enforcement issues.

“We’ve made tremendous strides,” said Chavez, 53. “I think today we have opened doors for younger agents to be treated fairly.”

There are now nine Latinos among the 49 senior managers in the DEA. They head six of the agency’s 21 U.S. field offices and two of the four major foreign offices. About 100 others are in supervisory positions.

Though Latinos now account for 18.8% of the agency’s top field managers, Latinos make up only about 8% of the agency’s force of 4,100 agents.

“It’s hard recruiting these days,” Chavez said, noting that many major local police departments pay more to recruits.

“In my area, Imperial County is an office that’s really hard to fill,” he added. “It’s hot and dirty.... In the last four years, I’ve had five new agents quit after they drove there and got a look at it.... One who stayed, his wife divorced him.”

Delgado, promoted in January to head the San Francisco office, believes the DEA holds no one back because of race or gender.

But he acknowledges that the year of the civil suit settlement brought a career turning point for him. He had spent four years in Madrid, serving as a DEA liaison with European police in fighting a growing cocaine problem there.

“The Colombians were using Spain as the gateway into Europe,” said Delgado, 53. “I loved the field work in Madrid, and I had two more years that I could stay there.

“But they wanted me back in 1991 to become a group supervisor in our Fresno office,” he added. “I’m not sure if it was related to the lawsuit.”

Skin color and ethnic origin don’t really matter on the streets, Delgado added. White, black, Latino and Asian agents can all work the same cases.

“The only thing drug dealers care about is money,” he said. “All you have to have is a good informant. And the only color you need in the DEA is green.”