Years ago, I had a run-in with drug-smuggling Mennonites in the area around Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua in Mexico, and wrote about it, and the decay of traditional Mennonite communities there, in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.
A recent narcotics arrest in Canada is about that as well. The Mexican Old Colony Mennonites have been working with drug cartels, and been major importers of marijuana and cocaine to Canada and the U.S. themselves, for years.
They began in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and were able to use their ingenuity as mechanics and welders to fashion new hiding places for drugs in trucks and cars.
For my book, I found that the largest drug bust in the history of the state of Oklahoma up to that time was a Mennonite ring run out Cuauhtemoc. The main informant, now presumed dead, was himself Mennonite.
Used to be a Mennonite family crossing into El Paso would be waved through Customs. Now they get the full treatment — drug dogs, mirrors under the car, etc.
One man I spoke with said a common way to smuggle drugs was to strap them around a senile grandmother, wearing a long dress and a traditional bonnet and looking for all the world like a peasant for the 1800s.
This photo here is from an AA meeting I attended for Mennonites in the communities near Cuauhtemoc.
I lived in a big Mennonite community an we all knew what happens inside the community but we had to respect code of silence.
In all my life I have never seen so much cash money, coming from nowhere but if you comment on anything they would make your life miserable. I know one man in particular who became millionaire in just 4 years, a man almost illiterate who started buying junk machines in the U.S. and sell them in Mexico. The strange thing about all this is that mr. Abe. since he began selling junk at the same time he started buying hundreds of thousands hectares of land in Mexico, U.S. and Canada.
Now he is the richest man in the Mennonite región of Cuauhtémoc. He also built his own church with its own style of worship and interestingly all the members of that church became rich overnight. The interesting thing is that hundreds of junk machines that Mr. Abe bought in the past 4 years are still unsold. It seems that Mr. Abe receives many miracles or we would wonder who actually are behind the drug traffiking and money loundering in the Mennonite world, the few mules arrested in Colorado or the bosses sitting in the office?
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