America's Booming Opium Demand Relies on Mexico's Youngest Workers Azam Ahmedaug - The New York Times
go to original August 29, 2015

Farmers in the southwestern state of Guerrero are increasingly seeding fields of poppies to cash in on the boom in heroin consumption in the United States. Al Jazeera's Adam Raney speaks to Mexican farmers who have chosen to engage in the illegal business. (Al Jazeera English)

With her nimble hands, tiny feet and low center of gravity, Angelica Guerrero Ortega makes an excellent opium harvester.

Deployed along the Sierra Madre del Sur, where a record poppy crop covers the mountainsides in strokes of green, pink and purple, she navigates the inclines with the deftness of a ballerina.

Though shy, she perks up when describing her craft: the delicate slits to the bulb, the patient scraping of the gum, earning in one day more than what her parents do in a week.

That she is only 15 is not so important for the people of her tiny mountain hamlet. If she and her classmates miss school for the harvest, so be it. In a landscape of fallow opportunities, income outweighs education.

“It is the best option for us,” Angelica said, leaning against a wood-plank house in her village, where nearly all of the children work the fields. “Back down in the city, there is nothing for us, no opportunities.”

As heroin addiction soars in the United States, a boom is underway south of the border, reflecting the two nations’ troubled symbiosis. Officials from both countries say that Mexican opium production increased by an estimated 50 percent in 2014 alone, the result of a voracious American appetite, impoverished farmers in Mexico and entrepreneurial drug cartels that straddle the border.

Read the rest at The New York Times

Related: Mexico's Opium Boom: 'The Cartels Have a Pretty Good Handle on the Appetite in the US' (Business Insider)

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