At first of the twentieth century, the boundary between the US and Mexico was largely notional. In that surroundings, the tequila maker José Cuervo started to forge an empire by specializing in American drinkers — displaying merchandise on the St. Louis World’s Honest, partaking Southern Pacific to assemble a railroad line to his distillery within the city of Tequila, and finally even shopping for his personal trains to penetrate Pancho Villa’s revolutionary traces en path to Texas. After Villa staged a bloody cross-border raid, Gen. John J. Pershing led about 10,000 U.S. troops into Mexico in pursuit.
When Germany provided to ally with Mexico and towards the US, President Woodrow Wilson responded by getting into World Warfare I — and by banning commerce with Mexican firms with an excessive amount of “German affect.” As Cuervo’s nephew and enterprise adviser was the German consul in Guadalajara, his tequila firm was banned in 1918. That very same 12 months, the primary part of border fence was erected and shortly, the creation of a border patrol was approved. Underneath the guise of preserving grains for meals, the manufacture and importation of all onerous liquor was additionally legally banned — and the black market exploded.
Seeing the chance, Cuervo banded collectively the homeowners of Sauza and Herradura to kind a union organized on a German cooperative mannequin — the cartel. It transported items by rail to frame cities, the place smugglers carried bottles throughout on foot, within the trunks of vehicles, and thru the open desert in donkey straddles and pack saddles.
The US expanded enforcement and constructed extra fencing in an effort to dam the shipments, and the nation’s foray into Prohibition in January 1920 prolonged import and gross sales bans nationally. Two months later, 25,000 empty tequila bottles have been present in El Paso, all bearing the Cuervo label and all headed again to Mexico to be refilled and carried throughout once more. The US cracked down even tougher — particularly alongside the Rio Grande, the place the shoot-first mentality of the Texas Rangers led to pitched gun battles throughout the desert and brush nation.
In December 1929, as the primary decade of Prohibition drew to an in depth, the editors of The Washington Herald tallied 1,360 deaths “by official violence,” with a number of the highest numbers in El Paso — greater than Al Capone’s Chicago. In reality, the border area of Texas accounted for roughly 8 % of all Prohibition-related deaths nationwide by then. Cuervo’s tequila cartel unraveled after his loss of life in 1921, bringing violence to the Mexican facet of the border, too, as households vied for better management of the commerce and fractured into smaller cartels.
