Mexican Opium Prices Plummet, Driving Poppy Farmers to Migrate
The drop in prices is leading poppy farmers to seek work in the United States and other places.
Poppies growing near the community of Ahuixotitla in the La Montaña region of the Mexican state of Guerrero. The region is one of the main producers of the raw material used for heroin production.CreditCreditBrett Gundlock for The New York Times
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By Kirk Semple
SAN MIGUEL AMOLTEPEC VIEJO, Mexico — For years, two young brothers, like many other farmers in their poor, mountainous region of southwest Mexico, found salvation in the opium poppy. They bled the milky latex from its pods and the profits made their hard lives a little easier.
The fact that this substance was the raw material for most of the heroin consumed in the United States was of little concern to the family, if they even knew it at all. But then changes in that distant market for illegal drugs made the price of the dried opium latex plummet.
“I don’t know what happened and suddenly the price fell,” recalled the older brother Ricardo, 19, who was raised here in San Miguel Amoltepec Viejo, a tiny hamlet in the La Montaña region of Guerrero state. “We could no longer buy a lot of things: corn, all the necessities.”
The crop had once yielded profits beyond any other. But a price drop of about 90 percent over the past year and a half has plunged farmers in this village and hundreds of others scattered across the rugged slopes of La Montaña, into extreme poverty.
Many of them have joined the soaring numbers of Central Americans and others who have migrated north, causing a crisis along the southwestern American border that has worsened tensions between Mexico and the Trump administration.
Ricardo and his 17-year-old brother were among them. They now pick strawberries in California. Ricardo asked to be identified by his first name only because he is an undocumented immigrant.
The reason for the sudden fall in opium demand is a matter of speculation, but is almost certainly related to changes in the supply and demand of illegal drugs in the United States, officials and experts in Mexico and the United States say.
Some evidence is emerging that fentanyl, a powerful and highly addictive synthetic opiate, is replacing heroin and other drugs, particularly on the East Coast. The soaring production of heroin in recent years may also have accounted for the recent drop.
The area under poppy cultivation in Mexico reached a record high in 2017, rising 38 percent from the previous year, according to statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration. Over the same period, heroin production increased by a similar percentage, rising to more than 122 tons in 2017 from about 89 tons the year before, perhaps creating a glut in the market, officials and experts say.
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In the largely indigenous farming communities of the La Montaña region, however, there is only bewilderment about the fact that something so lucrative has suddenly become so worthless.
The numbers are stark: At the market’s peak in 2017, the farmers were selling their opium resin for as much as $590 per pound. It currently fetches no more than $50 per pound.
Mountain slopes that were once blanketed with the plant, its pink, purple and red flowers lending a burst of vibrancy to an otherwise dusty landscape, now lie fallow or have been replaced by subsistence crops — mainly corn.
There is widespread bewilderment about the cause of the precipitous drop in demand. The word “fentanyl” is met with puzzled looks. Few residents even admit to knowing that the opium resin is converted into drugs for consumption in the United States.
“We heard on the news that it was used in pills,” said Delfino Morán Ramírez, 43, a community leader in Ahuixotitla, another agricultural hamlet in the La Montaña region. “But beyond that, no.”
Still, residents of this area — one of the most impoverished regions in Mexico and long-ignored by the government — know full well the pain inflicted by the price drop.
“The cultivation of poppy was so that your kids could go to school, so you could buy clothes, so you could get something extra,” said Abel Barrera, director of Tlachinollan, a human rights group that works among the communities of the La Montaña region. It meant simple improvements in the quality of life, like the addition of eggs to the diet, or meat on a family’s plates more than once a week.
“Because of that, the poppy became a magic plant: It permitted you to breathe economically,” Mr. Barrera said. “The fact that it was an illegal crop didn’t matter.”
Higher incomes also allowed people to stay home instead of migrating, as earlier generations had done, in search of more lucrative work. Families remained together. Parents could watch their children grow up. The community felt stronger.
But when the income from opium poppy evaporated, many families were left with nothing, having shifted all their agricultural efforts to that single crop.
“The people were left exposed,” Mr. Barrera said.
And in short order, large-scale migration from the region resumed, rupturing families and the communal fabric.
Most of those who have left the La Montaña region have chosen destinations within Mexico, finding work in the agricultural fields and factories of other, wealthier states. But many others have headed to the United States, particularly to agricultural communities in California where enclaves of migrants from Guerrero have put down roots.
Migration has gutted hamlets throughout the area.
Before the crisis began, there were about 500 residents in San Miguel Amoltepec Viejo, which sits on the edge of a steep valley. Now there are fewer than 300.
About 20 of those who left have migrated to the United States, mostly younger men, said Celso Santiago Cayetano, a community leader. But at least a third of the cement-block houses now sit empty, their owners having migrated.
Many families have been broken up by migration, with the men going off to look for work, and those remaining behind surviving on remittances.
“At least with the poppy, the family would work the fields together,” Mr. Cayetano said.
Among those who remain behind in the former poppy communities of La Montaña, most are at least thinking about migrating themselves.
Filiberto, 26, a farmer in the hamlet of Ahuixotitla, said that for about eight years, he cultivated opium poppy on a plot of land that produced several pounds of opium resin a year. The income allowed him to stay in Ahuixotitla and raise his two children, now 4 and 5.
But he now plans to contract a migrant smuggler to help him get to the United States. His departure is set for August.
“I don’t want to go, but there isn’t money,” he said, providing only his first name out of concern that the government might seek to punish him. “You’re always lacking money here.”
His 17-year-old brother also plans to migrate to the United States. And their mother, Juliana, can only watch as her family comes apart.
“I don’t want them to go, but they want to go,” she said. “It’s sad because there isn’t any work.”
When times were flush, buyers or “mules” would arrive in Ahuixotitla, sometimes as often as twice a day, to buy freshly harvested opium, and farmers with product to sell would gather it from their homes and head down the mountain to make the sale.
The resin was transported to small labs elsewhere in the country, where it was turned into heroin and then smuggled across Mexico’s northern border into the United States.
These days, the mules come around maybe once a month — if at all.
On a recent morning in Ahuixotitla, the hamlet was making final preparations for the annual three-day festival dedicated to the community’s patron saint, a high point in the year’s social calendar.
In better times, the hamlet’s leadership donated four cows to feed the participants. This year, they could only afford one. Before, they bankrolled hundreds of cases of beer, but this year they could only spring for six.
The economic slump has bred resentment toward the federal government, with the growing bitterness concentrated on President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who in April acknowledged the crisis affecting the poppy farmers in Guerrero.
“We’re taking care of this situation,” the president said at a news conference. “Many are being taken care of and they will all be taken care of.”
But residents of La Montaña say promises of financial aid and crop substitution programs have not materialized, and many have begun to regret casting their vote for the president in last year’s election.
Some are counting on a rebound in the demand and have stockpiled a few pounds of opium in the hope that the prices go back up. And some experts say that’s not an unreasonable expectation: illegal drug markets are highly elastic, and tastes shift.
In the meantime, the struggle is to figure out how to make it through the day, and that calculus is increasingly involving migration.
“Even more are going to go,” predicted Mr. Cayetano, the community leader here in San Miguel Amoltepec Viejo. But he was hopeful that better days lay ahead.
“The migrants are going to come back,” he said. “God willing.”
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