Mexican opium farmers expand plots to supply U.S. heroin boom
Mexican farmers from three villages interviewed by The Associated Press are feeding a growing addiction in the U.S., where heroin use has spread from back alleys to the cul-de-sacs of suburbia. (Photo: AP )
Red and purple blossoms with fat, opium-filled bulbs blanket the remote
creek sides and gorges of the Filo Mayor mountains in the southern state of
Guerrero.
The multibillion-dollar
Mexican opium trade starts here, with poppy farmers so poor they live in
wood-plank, tin-roofed shacks with no indoor plumbing.
Mexican farmers from three
villages interviewed by The Associated Press are feeding a growing addiction in
the U.S., where heroin use has spread from back alleys to the cul-de-sacs of
suburbia.
The heroin trade is a losing
prospect for everyone except the Mexican cartels, who have found a new way to
make money in the face of falling cocaine consumption and marijuana
legalization in the United States. Once smaller-scale producers of low-grade
black tar, Mexican drug traffickers are now refining opium paste into
high-grade white heroin and flooding the world's largest market for illegal
drugs, using the distribution routes they built for marijuana and cocaine.
It is a business that even
the farmers don't like. In a rare interview with reporters, the villagers told
The Associated Press that it's too difficult to ship farm products on roads so
rough and close to the sky that cars are in constant danger of tumbling off the
single-lane dirt roads that zig-zag up to the fields. They say the small
plastic-wrapped bricks of gummy opium paste are the only thing that will
guarantee them a cash income.
"Almost everyone thinks
the people in these mountains are bad people, and that's not true," said
Humberto Nava Reyna, the head of the Supreme Council of the Towns of the Filo
Mayor, a group that promotes development projects in the mountains. "They
can't stop planting poppies as long as there is demand, and the government
doesn't provide any help."
Villagers granted the AP
access to their farms and agreed to interviews only if they were not
identified, fearing it could draw attention from government drug eradicators or
vengeful traffickers.
Residents say there are no
local users. They hate the taste of the bitter paste, which they sometimes rub
into their gums to sooth an aching tooth.
It all goes for export, a
lucrative business mostly run by the Sinaloa Cartel.
According to the DEA's 2014
National Drug Threat Assessment, Mexico produces nearly half of the heroin
found in the United States, up from 39 percent in 2008.
Mexican government seizures
of opium and eradication of poppy plantations have skyrocketed in recent years.
The trends are consistent: Opium paste seizures in Mexico were up 500 percent
between 2013 and 2014; poppy field eradications were up 47 percent; and
seizures of the processed drug increased 42 percent. Along the U.S. border they
are three times what they were in 2009.
Mexican heroin has become
cheaper and more powerful at a time when Americans hooked on pharmaceutical
opiates are looking for an affordable alternative. Combined with dangerous
additives like fentanyl, a synthetic opiate also produced in Mexico, it is
blamed for a wave of new addictions and overdoses in the U.S. Heroin deaths
doubled from 2011 to 2013, while deaths from cocaine and prescription opiates
remained steady, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
It used to be that Mexican
cartels shipped brown heroin from Colombia along with their home-grown black
tar. But all producers are making the high-grade white now, and Mexican
criminal gangs have learned that they can increase their profits exponentially
if they manage the whole production chain, as with methamphetamines, which they
also control from precursor to user.
The Sinaloa cartel farms out
most production of opium paste to smaller traffickers, according to growers,
law enforcement and drug-trafficking experts interviewed by the AP. That kind
of decentralized system is a recipe for setting Guerrero's small, feuding drug
gangs, the Rojos, Pelones, Guerreros Unidos and others, against each other.
Since 2012, Guerrero has been
Mexico's most violent state. But only recently has it gotten world attention,
when 43 college students disappeared last September and are assumed murdered by
the Guerreros Unidos, who had close ties to the mayor in the town of Iguala and
reportedly viewed the students as a rival gang.
The growers won't say which gang
buys the opium paste they produce on small plots. But a buyer affiliated with
the local gang lives in almost every village, acting also as a lookout. Most
can be identified by the short-wave radios they carry in a region far from
telephone lines or cellular towers.
When the poppy plants finish
flowering about three months into the winter growing season, a farmer armed
with a razor-sharp, thumb-scorer and a metal scraping pan can collect 300 grams
of opium paste, worth 4,000 pesos (more than $275 USD), in a single day.
The price for the relatively
low-quality marijuana the farmers used to grow at lower elevations has fallen,
possibly because of the legalization and medical use of higher-quality U.S.
marijuana. Most law enforcement officials say it's still too early to document
an impact. But the farmers see a change. They only get about 250 pesos (about
$17 USD) per dried, pressed kilogram (2.2 pounds) of marijuana, compared to
13,000 pesos (nearly $900 USD) per kilo of opium paste.
One wiry farmer with a joking
manner and a baseball cap noted that's more than he could make in a month at
any legitimate job, if there were any legitimate jobs around. But they can lose
a season's work in a few minutes to the government helicopters that spray
powerful herbicides on any fields they find.
Towering pine and fir trees
on the hillsides help shield the poppy fields from view, and some of the
mountain villages that protect their forests from illegal logging do so to hide
their fields.
But they are detectable to
the experienced eye, rare spots of green in the winter, when most other crops
have been harvested. Since they use gravity-fed irrigation systems from
mountain streams, they are usually near creek beds, with black plastic tubing
bringing the water down to drip or spray systems at each plant.
The herbicide kills both the
poppies and anything around them. No one in these villages has been told what
it is. And it can kill or damage local Ocote pine trees, allowing beetles to
move and attack the weakened trees, and then neighboring trees, farmers said.
"The money the
government spends on aerial spraying would better be spent on long-term
development projects," Nava Reyna said.
When the buyer stocks enough
opium paste from the farmers, he calls his cartel bosses to have it picked up
and taken for processing at a lab.
From the Guerrero mountains,
most of the opium paste is shipped to wholesale collection points like Iguala,
a city at the crossroads of several highways, including the interstate from
Acapulco on the Pacific Coast to Mexico City. There it is packed aboard
passenger buses for "shotgun" smuggling to labs sometimes as far as
the U.S. border. Once the paste becomes heroin, it is moved like any other drug
in cars, trailers, buses, and mules across the border to the U.S. market.
There are no mega-labs for
heroin, unlike those for meth. Though there are raids, they're generally small
and they don't make news.
Many farmers say they would
like to give up poppy cultivation and plant legitimate crops, in part because
of the bloodshed the trade has brought to Guerrero.
Some growers are trying. In
two of the three self-admitted opium growing villages the AP visited, residents
have tried planting avocados, a crop that can bring cash income at similar
altitudes in the neighboring state of Michoacan. They have also built trout
ponds.
But the trout are small
because of a lack of food, and avocados take at least seven years before they
yield a viable amount of green, shiny fruit.
One farmer proudly showed off
the 2- and 3-year old avocado trees he had planted on his steep hillside plot
of about 20 acres. Because the trees can produce for four or five decades, he
may someday have a plot his children and grandchildren can make a living from.
But cultivation is expensive.
So meanwhile, the farmer walked further down his plot, into a narrow creek
valley, where his "flower garden" grows. He waited to score his bulbs
until noon, "because the sun draws the gum out."
"This," he said,
pointing to the poppy bulb he has just scribed with a cutting tool to let the
sap leak out, "is what finances that" he said, pointing uphill to the
avocado trees.