Guerrero State's Battle Between Indigenous Communities and the Drug Cartels Jeremy Kryt - Earth Island Journal
go to original September 14, 2015

A sign outside the FUSDEG headquarters in Petaquillas reads: “Get out, Narco-government, from the communities of Guerrero!” (Jeremy Kryt)

Mexico’s southwestern Guerrero state is home to the nation’s highest murder rate, and it’s where 43 student teachers went missing last fall. As is the case in many parts of Mexico, the violence is tied directly to the drug trade. In Guerrero, the dry, cool climate of the Sierra Madre del Sur – the mountain range the runs through the heart of the state – provides ideal conditions for poppy cultivation.

At least 60 percent of all opium and heroin produced in the country comes from the remote region. The fallout from so much black-market activity is predictably deadly: More than a half-dozen cartels are currently engaged in vicious turf wars for control of valuable trade routes and production centers in Guerrero.

Guerrero’s largest Indigenous group, the Nahuas, maintains a strained, love-hate relationship with the drug trade. Traditionally, the Nahuas have grown staples such as corn and avocados, but low market prices and poor transportation routes make illicit crops increasingly attractive. For many indigenous farmers, planting poppies and harvesting the sticky goma (gum) is the only means to escape desperate poverty.

Meanwhile, other Native communities have banded together to fight narcotics production and trafficking at the source. They’ve armed themselves as best they can and have taken the law into their own hands in an attempt to establish a degree of security and human rights that the Mexican government either can’t – or won’t – provide for them.

Read the rest and see photos at Earth Island Journal

This article is part of a series examining the Indigenous movement of resistance and restoration
 

The Risky Life of Guerrero's Poppy Farmers Is a Hard Habit to Break in Mexico (Financial Times)

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