A historical overview of drug trafficking in Mexico, tracing its emergence, growth, and entrenchment in the socio-political fabric of the country, and setting the stage for its encroachment into natural protected areas. This chapter explores through a historical-documentary analysis the emergence of drug trafficking in Mexico, as well as its consolidation into large drug cartels and its expansion and territorial settlement throughout the country, including territories dedicated to environmental conservation, rural areas, and indigenous communities. This chapter considers temporally from the emergence and consolidation of drug trafficking until the first half of the 1980s. This chapter allows to understand (in a non-apologetic way) that the sowing, production, and geographic mobilisation of narcotics in Mexico respond to a set of social, environmental, economic, political and even social development factors.