The convoy drove out of the military base before dawn and into the mist-shrouded mountains that straddle Guatemala’s border with Mexico. Its mission: to destroy poppies used to make heroin.
Nearly 300 soldiers and police officers from an elite anti-narcotics unit in the convoy, armed with rifles and machetes, climbed steep hills and waded through bone-chilling streams. They chased leads on drone pilots, inhaling dust as they sped along washboard dirt roads in the back of a pickup truck.
But after searching village after village, they found only small patches of poppy fields everywhere – a fraction of the area that had been grown in the area in previous years.
“The land here used to be covered with poppies,” police commander Ludvin López said as soldiers fanned out around Ixchiguán, a remote area of hamlets. Inhabited by people who speak the Mayan language (Mam). But that was before opium prices plummeted from $64 an ounce to about $9.60, he added.
Over several days in March, a largely fruitless search for poppies in Guatemala exposed dramatic changes in Latin America’s drug trade.
Fentanyl has largely replaced heroin in the United States, the world’s largest illicit drug market, because Mexican cartels can produce synthetic opioids cheaply and easily in makeshift laboratories using chemicals from China. Fentanyl is so potent that it can be smuggled in small quantities hidden in vehicles, another advantage over heroin.
As a result, demand for poppies plummeted.
In Guatemala, poppy growers are losing their main income from their only cash crop, forcing many in already impoverished areas to immigrate to the United States. Meanwhile, local and international authorities are concerned that Guatemala could become a new trading hub for chemicals used to make fentanyl.
Drug enforcement operations on the U.S.-Mexico border have also shown a decline in heroin levels. Fiscal Year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Office of Field Operations seized 1,500 pounds of heroin, down from 5,400 pounds in 2021.
The amount of fentanyl seized during the same period more than doubled from about 11,000 pounds to 27,000 pounds.
Even as fentanyl disrupts the heroin trade and counter-narcotics priorities change, U.S. authorities say Guatemala still needs U.S. support for poppy eradication efforts, albeit limited, to curb the influence of Mexican cartels that produce heroin.
However, a State Department official who was not authorized to discuss counternarcotics strategy said Guatemala’s top priority now is cracking down on synthetic drugs and testing the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl.
But the soldiers stomping through small vegetable gardens in remote villages were looking for poppies. They found some poppies and, no further than the hopscotch area, began cutting down the plants with machetes. They did the same with the occasional marijuana plant, which is still illegal to grow in Guatemala.
There were multiple signs of U.S. support for the mission and for Guatemala’s counternarcotics efforts in general. Some officers on the mission belong to DEA-supported units and are regularly subjected to polygraph and drug tests. The soldiers travel in four-wheel-drive vehicles donated by the United States.
The State Department declined to provide a detailed breakdown of U.S. anti-drug funding. But Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for the Office on Latin America in Washington, said the country has recently received about $10 million to $20 million a year in military and police aid from the United States.
This is about the same amount of aid as a decade ago; overall, Guatemala is one of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid in Latin America.
An observer from the U.S. State Department also accompanied the visit. The State Department funds everything from training border police to elite anti-gang units in Guatemala. He declined to comment, saying he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
As the soldiers’ efforts were mostly fruitless, they spent some time joking around the pickup truck. To spread goodwill, some distributed the contents of food bags to villagers; others gave away cheap plastic toys to children.
Still, in an extremely poor area where each mature poppy plant costs about 25 quetzals (about $3.20), some villagers were visibly angry at the soldiers’ presence. Some refuse to talk to anyone on the team, believing it deprives them of one of their only sources of income.
“We have almost no poppies left here,” said Ana Leticia Morales, 26, a Ma language-speaking mother of two who makes a living by selling gasoline smuggled from Mexico. born. “But the soldiers came anyway, not to help us but to make things worse.”
Tensions over eradication efforts have been rising for decades in Guatemala, Central America’s most populous country. Poppies, traditionally grown in mountainous areas from Türkiye to Pakistan, are now being cultivated. Appear decades ago in Guatemala and parts of Mexico and Colombia.
Mexican cartels rely on Guatemalan farmers to grow poppies, which are then turned into opium gum. Drug cartels smuggle the gum across the border into Mexico, where it is converted into heroin.
The U.S. initially responded by spraying herbicides on Guatemalan aircraft, but suspended those efforts after the crews came under concentrated fire. This opened the way for today’s ground operations.
Fentanyl has become a cheaper, more profitable source of revenue for drug cartels over the past decade upside down Mexico’s poppy trade also has spillover effects in Central America. Now, the cartels don’t have to worry about heavy rains ruining the harvest. Nor do they need to worry about eradication operations.
Guatemalan eradicators destroyed about 2,011 acres of poppies in 2017 and only 7 acres in 2023, Guatemalan government data shows.
The decline illustrates the ease with which Mexico can produce fentanyl in small labs the size of studio apartments using chemicals imported from China, making it ideal for production in urban settings.
“It’s easier to produce synthetic opioids in a laboratory than to rely on crops grown in remote mountainous areas,” said Rigoberto Quemé, an anthropologist in Guatemala’s poppy-growing region. “The authorities are attacking the weakest link in the production chain,” he added, referring to eradication efforts. “But drug trafficking has not disappeared, but has grown exponentially.”
In fact, Guatemala remains a vital country Smuggling links Another illegal drug – cocaine.The country is also becoming a CocaGrowing plants used to make cocaine.
Anti-narcotics officials in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States are concerned that two Mexican drug cartels, the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generations, are vying for control of routes already used to smuggle cocaine and opium gum out of Guatemala and that they could exploit These same pathways transport fentanyl chemical precursors to Mexico. Mexico.
Guatemalan authorities last year arrested Ana Gabriela Rubio Zea, a convicted felon show off Her social media fortune has been linked to a plan to import chemicals from China to produce fentanyl for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.
Ms Rubio Zea run An upscale clothing boutique Elite stronghold Cajala, of Guatemala City, was extradited to the United States last July to face fentanyl distribution and money laundering charges that could lead to life in prison.Mexican authorities subsequently took action arrest In January, Guatemalan businessman Jason Antonio Young Lopez was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for importing fentanyl precursor chemicals.
Guatemala’s new president, Bernardo Arevalo, is strengthening ties with the United States to combat the fentanyl trade.At a ceremony in March attended by U.S. officials, his administration said it was working promote Ways to combat trade in precursor chemicals in Guatemala.
But these efforts mean little to villagers who face declining demand for opium poppies on the one hand and eradication plans on the other.
Regino García, a Mam leader from Ixchiguán in San Antonio, said opium poppy prices began to plummet in 2017, eventually falling from 18,000 quetzals ($2,310) per kilogram to 2,000 quetzales ($256).
“The poppy used to help a lot of people make ends meet,” Mr. Garcia said. Now, he said, the sharp drop in poppy prices is causing so much economic pain that “people are fleeing to the United States before the money runs out.”
Jody Garcia Guatemala City contributed reporting.
