Poor Farmers in Mexico Turn to Opium Poppies to Meet Surge in US Heroin Demand Mark Stevenson - Associated Press
go to original February 3, 2015

Villagers gather to talk with Associated Press journalists about their communities and dependence on growing opium to make a living in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains of Guerrero state, Mexico. Many farmers say they would like to give up poppy cultivation and plant legitimate crops, in part because of the bloodshed the trade has brought to their state. Some growers have tried planting avocados and built trout ponds, but the trout are small because of a lack of food, and avocados take at least seven years before they yield a viable amount of fruit. (AP/Dario Lopez-Mills)

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 US, 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 legalisation 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.

Read the rest at The Guardian

Mexican farmers grow poppies under the thumb of the cartel, while the military take aim to cut the farms down. (National Geographic)

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