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.
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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.
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Associated Press writer Katherine Corcoran in Mexico City contributed to this report.
