Fentanyl Kills Mexico's Opium Trade

Poppies in the Guerrero mountains go from boom to bust

This is part two of a series of stories from the Mexican state of Guerrero working with photo journalist Javier Verdin (photos throughout) and reporter Servando Mellin with support from Bobby X Media.

In the boom days of the mid 2010s, Agustín once got a whopping 33,000 pesos (now about two thousand dollars) for a kilo of opium gum he scraped from the seed pods of poppies he grew. What’s more, the demand was so great, he couldn’t keep up with his buyer. Traffickers turned the gum into heroin for the burgeoning U.S. market of addicts, many who at that time had switched from legal opioids like OxyContin. The income made Agustín wealthy by the standards of the ragged mountain towns that dot Mexico’s southern Sierra Madre in the state of Guerrero.

But today Agustín is lucky to get 4,000 pesos ($250) for a kilo of gum and he has a three tin cans of it that have been sitting in his shack for a month. The market has collapsed as cartels have switched from heroin to the synthetic fentanyl that they make from precursors they import, mostly from China.

“I hardly even get back what I spend,” the 54 year old farmer tells me as we clamber down a slope to his poppy field under the blazing sun. “But I have been growing this for so many years it’s hard to change.”

Fentanyl is driving the worst overdose epidemic that the United States has ever seen with over 108,000 O.D. deaths in 2022. An incidental casualty is the Mexican opium trade.

In Guerrero, one of the states that produces the lion’s share of the crop, villages that have grown poppies for decades have plunged into poverty. The hunger pushes a new wave of migrants to El Norte and local cartels that milked the commerce have switched to mass extortion.

Yet there are positive sides to the crash. Opium farmers cleared woodland but now trees and wild plants are returning helping endangered animals such as jaguars who roam the hills. And it weakens the link between the villages and cartels while forcing them to look for alternatives.

“Opium never really transformed these communities. People would spend money on food and parties and going out but few actually invested in infrastructure,” says Joaquin Nuñez Medrano, a forestry engineer who works in the region. “We need projects that are sustainable, that give people a solid living and work with the environment.”

“The Joy Plant”

We reach the crops traveling up the Guerrero mountains on dirt roads, first for two hours by pick-up truck and then another hour on quad bikes (which are fun on the beach but uncomfortable and dangerous on the jagged highland paths).

There is no denying the beauty of the opium field, the poppies of pink and purple and white and red bathed in sunlight, the distinctive spherical seed pods. Papaver somniferum is one of the earliest recorded crops by humans with the Sumerians calling it Hul Gil or the “joy plant” in 3,400 B.C. The Chinese likely brought opium to Mexico when they came to work in mines and rail roads in Sinaloa in the late nineteenth century. The earliest documented U.S. investigation into opium smuggling from Mexico is back in 1916.

It’s not clear exactly when opium made its way south down the Sierra Madre range from Sinaloa to Guerrero. But I meet Magdalena, a 70 year old who has lived in the mountains her whole life, and she says opium was already grown there when she was a little girl in the 1950s.

With lively green eyes and a worn face, Magdalena tells me how she was married at 13 and a widow at 17 and grew the plant to feed her family. “Opium poppies raised my children,” Magdalena says and she hugs the flowers in the sun-baked field.

The technology for cultivating poppies has changed little over the decades. It takes about four months for poppies to mature and they need rain, or a watering system. The farmers scrape the seed pod with a makeshift knife with two blades and store the gum in a tin can, as shown below. While it looks mucky, its smell is pleasant and fruity.

Magdalena shows me different types of seeds. There is “original,” which they also call “Sinaloan,” another that produces a purple poppy and another from Afghanistan, which they aptly call “Talibana.” The Afghan poppy is white with a pink rim and has also cross-bred with Sinaloan poppies to make a new hybrid.

The villagers talk of an earlier boom in the 1970s; that coincides with a heroin scourge in the United States which was driven by addicted soldiers returning from Vietnam. Back then, they would take the opium gum down the mountains on pack mules, which they call “beasts.” Today, they zip it to town on quad bikes.

The mountain dwellings are remote and scattered over the hills, which favors drug production and reduces the incentive for paved roads. Soldiers have to scour vast areas to find crops and tear them up. Sometimes, the farmers pay off troops to let them keep the harvest. Mexico has sporadically done aerial spraying with herbicides which has the brutal side effect of also poisoning food crops and the whole environment.

Magdalena and Agustín say they have never used opium themselves and don’t know people in the mountains who do. It’s a crop for export not local consumption. They are independent farmers and not personally part of any cartel just the bottom rung of drug production.

However, an old crime family controls the area and during the boom years it would actually set the prices they would sell the gum at. The buyers come from different parts and pay for the gum with fat wads of cash, taking it to labs scattered across the country to turn into black tar heroin or Mexican Mud.

Several growers quote a ballad to me about opium farming by a Guerrero group called Los Armadillos de la Sierra. It tells of how soldiers seize a farmer’s opium but he sneaks in and cuts gum from it while the troops are snoring.

“I went to sell it; I needed the money, to pay the laborers; first things are first; and then calmly; I went and bought myself a new car.”

End of an Opium Era?

Mexico’s opium crops, and in turn heroin production, rose sharply in the 2000s and 2010s. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime uses satellites to take photos of opium fields and found peak Mexican production in the 2016 to 2017 harvest at about 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres).

The year 2017 was also when heroin deaths peaked in the United States at about 15,000. The poppies that Agustín and Magdalena grow have likely been in the mix in fatal overdoses.

What is replacing it though is far worse. Synthetic fentanyl was found in the bodies of more than 71,000 of the 108,000 overdose victims in 2022.

The cartel shift from heroin to fentanyl came gradually and then suddenly. Sinaloan trafficker Dámaso “El Mini Lic” described to Luis Chaparro how they began putting fentanyl into heroin from 2013 in what they called “synthetic chiva.” As users got used to it, cartels moved to sell pure fentanyl; it’s much cheaper to produce and gets rid of the inconvenience of peasant farmers and crop destruction.

In 2021, U.S. border agents first seized more fentanyl than heroin and the scales have tilted further since. Between 2021 and early 2024, heroin seizures on the border have dived 85 percent while fentanyl has hit record levels.

Nuñez (below) works with one village where pretty much everyone grew opium; he says that 60 percent of residents have emigrated since the price crash. The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has upped subsidies for farmers but Nuñez says it’s not enough to compensate. He works with communities on other sources of income, including alternative crops such as avocados, logging and attempts at ecotourism but says it is difficult to replace the lost income.

Some opium farmers in Guerrero are pushing for legalization of the poppy crop. But while a few Mexican lawmakers have shown interest, there has been little movement on the issue; López Obrador himself expresses fairly conservative views on drug policy reform.

Neither Agustín nor Magdalena are enthusiastic about legalization. They fear it could mean having to comply with a bunch of regulations and force the price down further.

Other farmers in Guerrero have switched to growing coca plants, the raw ingredient for cocaine. While traffickers have long struggled to produce good coca outside the Andes, blow production in Mexico is finally increasing.

Nuñez says that despite the challenges, he is confident the people of the mountains can find a sustainable way to live without drug production.

“It is not going to happen overnight, but we have to make the changes little by little,” he says. “Opium is not coming back. We have to find a new way of life.”

Copyright all photos Javier Verdin 2024

Copyright text Ioan Grillo and CrashOutMedia 2024