‘More convenient than relying on a crop’: how fentanyl has displaced the poppy trade in Guatemala

At the border between Guatemala and Mexico, a convoy rolls out of a military base before dawn, towards the mist-shrouded mountains. That convoy’s mission: to destroy bulb poppies from which heroin is made. Armed with guns and machetes, nearly 300 soldiers and police from the elite anti-drug units climb steep slopes. They wade through icy streams. They follow directions from drone pilots and speed along unpaved roads in pickup trucks. They comb village after village. But in the end they only find a few small poppy plots, a fraction of what was grown in the region in previous years.

“It used to be completely full of poppies,” says police commander Ludvin López as soldiers spread out across Ixchiguán, an area full of remote hamlets populated by speakers of the Mayan language known as Mam. But then the price of opium plummeted from $64 to about $9.60 per ounce.

This largely fruitless search for bulb poppies reveals a dramatic shift in Latin America’s drug trade.

In the United States, the world’s largest market for illicit drugs, fentanyl has largely displaced heroin because Mexican cartels can produce the synthetic opioid cheaply and easily in makeshift labs using chemicals from China. Fentanyl is also very powerful and the quantities required are therefore small, making it easy to smuggle the drug hidden in vehicles.

As a result, the demand for opium poppies has plummeted.
In Guatemala, poppy farmers are losing their main income, forcing many in poor areas to migrate to the United States. At the same time, local and international authorities fear that Guatemala could become a new trade center for the chemicals used to make fentanyl.

Drug seizures along the U.S.-Mexico border also highlight the decline in heroin trafficking. In fiscal year 2023, the US Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations seized 680 kilograms of heroin, compared to 2,450 kilograms in 2021. Fentanyl seizures more than doubled during the same period, with 4,990 kilograms in 2021 and 4,990 kilograms last year. 12,250 kilograms.

Even as fentanyl devastates the heroin trade and priorities in the war on drugs shift, U.S. authorities say U.S. support for opium poppy eradication is still needed in Guatemala to counter the reach of Mexican heroin-producing cartels. But Guatemala’s top priority is nevertheless the fight against synthetic drugs and the detection of chemicals used to make fentanyl, a US State Department official said.

10 to 20 million dollars per year

At one point, during their search, the soldiers finally find a small poppy field. They chop up the plants with their machetes and do the same with a single cannabis plant, which is still illegal in Guatemala.

The United States’ support for the mission—and Guatemala’s counternarcotics efforts in general—is clear in several ways. For example, some police officers participating in the mission belong to units supported by the US Drug Enforcement Administration and regularly undergo polygraph and drug tests. In addition, the soldiers travel in four-wheel drive vehicles donated by the United States and an observer from the United States Department of State accompanied the mission.

The US State Department would not provide a detailed overview of US funding for counter-narcotics in Guatemala. But overall, the country has recently been receiving $10 million to $20 million a year in military and police aid from the United States, said Adam Isacson, the director of the defense oversight division at the Washington Office on Latin America research group.
That is about the same as 10 years ago; Guatemala is one of the largest recipients of United States foreign aid in Latin America.

‘We’re almost out of poppies here’

Since the soldiers’ efforts are fruitless, they spend some of their time making jokes while standing around their pickup trucks. In an effort to boost the goodwill of the region’s residents, some are handing out some of their food parcels to villagers, while others are giving cheap plastic toys to children. But since a mature opium plant is worth about 25 quetzals (about 3 euros), some residents of the poor region are clearly angry about the presence of the soldiers. Some refuse to talk to anyone from the convoy, which takes away one of their only sources of income.

“We’re running out of poppies here,” said Ana Leticia Morales, 26, a Mam-speaking mother of two who makes a living selling gasoline smuggled from Mexico. “But the soldiers are still coming, not to help us, but to make things worse.”

Tensions over poppy eradication have been simmering for decades in Guatemala, Central America’s most populous country. Opium poppy, traditionally grown in mountainous areas stretching from Turkey to Pakistan, emerged decades ago in Guatemala and parts of Mexico and Colombia.

Mexican cartels relied on Guatemalan farmers to grow the opium poppy and then turn it into opium gum. Once that gum was smuggled across the border into Mexico, the cartels converted it into heroin. The United States initially responded by spraying herbicides from aircraft in Guatemala, but halted these efforts after the aircrews came under concentrated gunfire. They then opted for ground operations.

Crucial turntable

The rise of fentanyl over the past decade as a cheaper and much more profitable source of revenue for the cartels has upended the poppy trade in Mexico, with ripple effects in Central America. Now the cartels no longer have to worry about heavy rains, which can destroy crops. They also don’t have to worry about eradication operations.

Eradicaters in Guatemala destroyed about 2,011 hectares of opium poppies in 2017 and only 7 hectares in 2023, according to Guatemalan government figures.

The decline highlights the ease with which chemicals imported from China are used in Mexico to produce fentanyl in small, studio-sized labs, making it the ideal drug to make in urban settings.

“It is more convenient to produce a synthetic opioid in a laboratory than to rely on a crop grown in remote mountains,” says Rigoberto Quemé, an anthropologist from Guatemala’s poppy region. “The authorities are attacking the weakest link in the production chain, but the drug trade has not disappeared, it is still growing exponentially.”

Guatemala also remains a crucial hub for another illegal drug: cocaine. The country is also emerging as an important breeding ground for coca, the plant used to make cocaine.

Drug enforcement officials in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States worry that Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation, the two Mexican cartels vying for control of the routes used to smuggle cocaine and opium gum out of Guatemala, could use those same passageways to chemicals used for the production of fentanyl to Mexico.

For example, Guatemalan authorities last year arrested Ana Gabriela Rubio Zea, an entrepreneur known for bragging about her wealth on social media, in connection with a scheme to import chemicals from China to produce fentanyl for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. And last July, Rubio Zea, who ran an upscale clothing boutique in Guatemala City’s elite stronghold of Cayalá, was extradited to the United States to face charges of fentanyl distribution and money laundering, which could lead to life in prison. Mexican authorities followed suit in January with the arrest of Jason Antonio Yang López, a Guatemalan businessman sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for importing chemicals for the production of fentanyl.

Economic pain

Guatemala’s new president, Bernardo Arévalo, is strengthening ties with the United States in an effort to crack down on the fentanyl trade. At a March ceremony attended by U.S. officials, his government said it is trying to better combat the commodity trade in Guatemala.

But such efforts mean little to villagers who face declining demand for opium poppies as well as eradication programs.
Regino García, a Mam leader from San Antonio Ixchiguán, says the poppy price started to fall in 2017, eventually collapsing from 18,000 quetzals (about 2,170 euros) to 2,000 quetzals (240 euros) per kilogram.

“Poppies used to help a lot of people make ends meet,” García said. Now the sharp drop in poppy prices has caused so much economic pain that “people are leaving for the United States before they run out of money.”

_{© The New York Times}