Mexico’s Ayahuasca Prisoners

While fentanyl pours over the border, the Mexican government is prosecuting indigenous healers

Growing up among the Shipibo-Conibo people in the Amazon rainforests of Peru, José Campos became a curandero, or healer, when he was 24 and worked with the psychedelic infusion ayahuasca, which he regards as an extremely powerful medicine. For the last four decades, he conducted ayahuasca ceremonies in his homeland, where the brew, which is made from a combination of two plants, is recognized as a cultural patrimony and is legal.   

Last March 9, however, Campos traveled by plane into Mexico carrying four kilos of ayahuasca in paste form and was stopped by customs officials along with members of the Mexican marines. “I showed them the medicine and told them what it was. I didn’t try to hide it,” Campos tells me. “I didn’t think there was any problem.”

Travelers had been bringing in ayahuasca from South America to Mexico for decades without any issues. It is used in ceremonies across the country, which have becoming increasingly popular, especially for people looking to heal themselves from trauma or addiction.

This time, however, the marines conducted tests on the paste and then took Campos before federal prosecutors who charged him with drug trafficking. He could be sentenced to up 25 years in prison.

“In life, you have challenges. And this is one I have to face,” Campos says when I visit him in Mexico City’s vast northern prison. “Among the inmates, I find many people with deep traumas. It is an intense environment. It is like you are taking medicine every day.”

Campos, who is 64, is one of eight people who were arrested with ayahuasca flying into Mexico in 2022 and charged with trafficking. All the arrests took place after the marines took over control of customs in key Mexican airports, ostensibly to combat corruption. The Mexican government has included the seizures of ayahuasca in press conferences on the fight against narcos.

Mexico’s eight ayahuasca prisoners – of which four are from indigenous communities – have been caught up in the war on drugs at a time when cartels are murdering thousands of victims and record numbers of Americans die from overdoses. However, while vast amounts of perilous synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and crystal meth are pouring through Mexico, the security forces appear to have nabbed these curanderos to make up the arrest numbers. The prospects of long sentences are not only disproportionate but there is a strong argument that the charges should be completely thrown out as ayahuasca is not actually illegal in Mexico.     

Pepe Ramos, a lawyer on the defense team of Campos, explains that Mexico bases the relevant drug trafficking regulations on the 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances that it signed up to. This does not specifically outlaw ayahuasca or other similar infusions. It does make a scheduled substance of DMT (Dimethyltryptamine), an active ingredient that is found in ayahuasca. However, the International Narcotics Control Board, which oversees the treaty, has ruled that ayahuasca itself is not included, and if countries want to outlaw it they need to pass specific legislation – which Mexico has not.

“It has expressly clarified that there are certain traditional medicines…that are not part of this treaty,” Ramos said. “This is not a grey area. It’s simply not illegal in Mexico.”

A Mexican federal judge is scheduled to hear evidence on the Campos case in the last week of January. The result could set the precedent in the cases of the other seven accused.

Another of the prisoners is the Peruvian Lauro Hinostroza, a well-known curandero and founder of an institute for traditional medicine in Peru. Supporters, including students of Hinostroza, have held protests and an international indigenous representative group wrote a letter calling for his release.   

In December, a reporter asked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador about the case of Hinostroza during a morning press conference. The president said he would look to secure the curandero’s freedom, although his answer was a little ambiguous and he did not mention the other prisoners.

“We will look for him to be freed,” López Obrador said. “Surely, they consider it a drug and that is why they arrested him…The other thing is what the Supreme Court decided about the use of these herbs. I don’t have more to go by.”

The ayahuasca cases in Mexico underline the larger debates about drug use and the law that are raging round the world. Over the last decade, there has been a wave of marijuana legalization across much of the United States, as well as in countries including Uruguay, Canada, and Thailand. However, hopes that this would lead straight onto broader drug legalization have largely faltered.

Meanwhile, there are terrible problems in the United States with opioids including fentanyl that began as commercial products peddled by pharmaceutical companies. In contrast, there is a growing use of traditional medicines such as ayahuasca – and an interest by pharmaceutical companies in them.

In Mexico, hundreds of people now conduct ayahuasca ceremonies, both for Mexicans and for foreigners, some who travel here specifically for them. Many of the curanderos study for years with Peruvian healers such as Campos or Hinostroza.  

I talk to a pair of Mexican curanderos, a man and woman, who conduct ceremonies in which the participants drink the infusion in the evening and “trip” on it during the night to the sound of percussion and the aroma of incense. They don’t advertise but only work with those that come from recommendations. They are wary of too much comercialization of ayahuasca that could lead to people taking it in inadequate conditions.

“It’s not a recreational drug that you can take by yourself. Because you could have a bad time,” the woman said. “I always felt this was like a mission, that the people needed to know this. It’s a big jump. You can spend years meditating and you don’t get to the level that ayahuasca can get you in a single night, opening up the conscience and the heart and the spirit.”  

“We work with patients,” said the man. “People with depression. People with addictions. Or just people who want to expand their knowledge. We have worked to bring the knowledge from the jungle here...it is a way of seeing life.”

The coming court cases could be key in setting a precedent of where ayahuasca stands in Mexican law; whether it can be recognized as a legitimate medicine so revered by these curanderos or put into the box with the synthetics causing so much harm.

Yet whatever the judges rule, there will be likely be further debate about ayahuasca internationally and where it fits into the messy framework governing dangerous drugs and pharmaceutical companies and traditional medicines. For Campos himself, he sees a conflict between indigenous practices and powerful interests. “There is a constant struggle against the system,” he says.

Copyright 2023 Ioan Grillo and CrashOutMedia

Top two photos from Semar, lower photo by Ioan Grillo