Pubdate: Sun, 14 Jun 2015
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2015 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact:  http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Deborah Bonello, Special to Tribune Newspapers

DRUG 'GARDENS' FEEDING U.S. APPETITE

Opium Poppies Offer Small Growers in Mexico a Living - and Cartels Cash

CHILPANCINGO, Mexico - Mario moves quickly and easily down the steep 
forested hill. After a 30minute descent the tree cover clears, and 
the sun shines down onto the hidden red and purple flowers dotting 
the hillsides in the Filo Mayor mountains.

Producers in Mexico's Guerrero state call their clandestine poppy 
plots "gardens." What they raise there is highly marketable - and illicit.

Many of the flowers have no petals; they are simply plump, graying 
bulbs full of opium, ready for slicing.

It was Mario's father who taught him how to produce and cultivate 
poppies, a crop grown in Guerrero since the 1970s. After three years 
in Atlanta working in construction, Mario, who asked that his full 
name not be used in discussing his trade, came home 10 years ago to 
be with his family. But his job opportunities were limited.

"There's no other source of work here," he says.

Small "gardens" such as these feed the growing appetite for heroin 
across the northern border. The bulk of the drug sold in the United 
States now comes from Mexico, according to the latest assessment from 
the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Heroin seizures at the U.S. border with Mexico have more than doubled 
in the last five years, and Mexican cartels are now the dominant 
players in the heroin business on the streets of Chicago and 
Philadelphia and have greatly expanded their presence in New York City.

Yet despite the huge demand for their plants, the 30 producers in a 
small rural community interviewed recently appear far from wealthy. 
They're just getting by, they say, living in rudimentary wooden 
houses with corrugated metal roofs.

Mario also grows chiles and peaches and works as a carpenter to earn 
enough to feed his wife and three children. Poppy growers like him, 
he says, are being squeezed from both sides.

"Before we had freedom, freedom to sell where we liked and to whom we 
liked," he says. "Not anymore."

Now the buyers, working for or with the violent cartels that operate 
here, dictate the price of opium paste, Mario says.

"They keep their eye on you; if you produce poppies, then you have to 
sell it to them," he says. "They pay you what they want. Everything 
is under their control. The government as well; they come and destroy 
the crops."

The fragmentation of drug cartels in Mexico and the increasing 
pressure that crime networks face from both the authorities and one 
another have made the poppy business more lucrative - for the 
cartels, at least - as well as more competitive and violent.

In Guerrero, one of Mexico's most violence-ridden states, production 
and transportation of illicit crops - marijuana is also produced - 
have served to corrupt local government and state security forces to 
such an extent that many residents see organized crime and the 
government as the same thing.

"Organized crime has taken control of the state and its 
institutions," says Jorge Chabat, a professor at Mexico's Center for 
Economic Research and Teaching. "The real people in charge are the criminals."

Consequently, violence has spun out of control.

In September, 43 college students went missing in the city of Iguala 
in Guerrero after local police reportedly opened fire on their school 
bus. The students were detained by those policemen after the incident 
and haven't been seen since. Federal officials say the young people 
were handed over to a local drug gang and executed.

About 100 bodies have been pulled out of clandestine graves in the 
hills surrounding the city since then, but only one of the missing 
students has been identified among the remains.

Last month, at least 16 people disappeared in Chilapa, here in 
Guerrero, after armed men believed to be cartel members seized 
control of the town for five days from a rival cartel. Soldiers and 
police present in Chilapa did nothing as young men were rounded up 
and detained. They remain missing.

Violence intensified in Guerrero before the midterm elections last week.

The Chilapa siege came a couple of weeks after the assassination of a 
mayoral candidate. Ulises Fabian Quiroz was ambushed May 1 on a 
highway and shot in the head.

Mario says he was jumped by members of a drug gang two years ago. 
Sometimes, he says, the community lives under a de facto curfew. Only 
the drug traffickers move around at night. The poppy growers live in 
fear of being killed.

The government is moving in as well.

Farmers say Mexican marines destroyed thousands of plants during a 
raid early last month.

Mexico's attorney general's office didn't confirm the raid, but it 
did say that authorities destroyed nearly 30,000 acres of poppy crops 
in the first half of last year, nearly as much as they cut down 
during the whole of 2013

Mexican authorities seized about 570 pounds of opium paste during 
2014, a 42 percent increase from 2013.

The Mexican government has been working with the United Nations 
Office on Drugs and Crime for two years to better document the extent 
of illicit poppy cultivation. It is also considering measures other 
than eradication, according to Antonio Mazzitelli, the U.N. agency's 
Mexico representative.

"It's about creating an economic and social cycle that allows these 
communities to improve their lives," he says. "Organized crime is a 
problem, but so is the lack of social and economic development."

Farmers such as Mario say that there is little government support for 
poor, rural communities like his, and that promises to fund projects 
and create jobs have come to nothing.

The production cycle for poppies is short - three months from sowing 
to harvest - so many farmers use their illicit proceeds to fund legal crops.

Mario says that his chile and peach crops, which jostle for space 
next to the poppies on the mountainside, have started to reap better rewards.

This will be his last harvest before he hands his garden over to a 
partner, he says, expressing weariness of being pushed around by the cartels.

"That way I won't have problems with anyone else. I'll be my own boss 
and won't have to answer to anyone," he says.

But many here can't afford to put poppy growing behind them.

"Unless they create other sources of work," Mario says, "I don't 
think that poppies will ever disappear here." Tribune Newspapers' 
Cecilia Sanchez contributed from Mexico.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom