The convoy departed the military base before dawn and entered the fog-shrouded mountains that straddle the border between Guatemala and Mexico. The mission is to destroy poppies used to make heroin.
Armed with rifles and machetes, a caravan of about 300 soldiers and police from an elite anti-narcotics unit climbed steep hills and waded through bone-chilling streams. They followed the drone pilot’s lead and inhaled dust in the back of a pickup truck speeding down a washboard dirt road.
But after scouring the village, they found only tiny poppy fields here and there. This is just a fraction of the poppies grown in the area over the past few years.
“The ground here was covered with poppies,” police commander Ludvin Lopez said as soldiers fanned out around Ikchiguan, a remote village area inhabited by speakers of the Mayan language, Mam. But that was before opium prices plummeted from $64 an ounce to about $9.60, he added.
A few fruitless days in March in the search for opium poppies in Guatemala marked a sea change in the Latin American drug trade.
Fentanyl has largely replaced heroin in the United States, the world’s largest illicit drug market. That’s because of how cheaply and easily Mexican cartels can produce synthetic opioids in makeshift labs using chemicals from China. Fentanyl is so powerful that it can be smuggled in small quantities hidden in vehicles, another advantage over heroin.
As a result, demand for opium poppy plummeted.
In Guatemala, poppy farmers are losing their main income from their only cash crop, forcing many in an already poverty-stricken region to migrate to the United States. At the same time, local and international authorities are concerned that Guatemala could emerge as a new hub for trading chemicals used to make fentanyl.
Drug busts along the U.S.-Mexico border also show heroin’s decline. In fiscal year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Field Operations seized 1,500 pounds of heroin, up from 5,400 pounds in 2021.
During the same period, fentanyl seizures more than doubled, from about 11,000 pounds to 27,000 pounds.
Even as fentanyl has laid waste to the heroin trade and drug-fighting priorities have shifted, U.S. authorities say limited but still needed U.S. support for opium poppy eradication efforts in Guatemala to counter the influence of heroin-producing Mexican cartels.
Still, Guatemala’s top priorities now are fighting synthetic drugs and detecting precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, said an unidentified State Department official discussing drug interdiction strategies.
But soldiers trampling through small vegetable gardens in remote villages were targeting poppies. Finding a few poppies no bigger than a hopscotch game, they set to work using machetes to cut down the plants. They did the same with cannabis plants, which are still illegal to grow in Guatemala.
Several signs of U.S. support for the mission and for Guatemala’s general anti-drug efforts were on display. Some of the officers on duty are part of a unit supported by the Drug Enforcement Administration and undergo regular polygraph and drug tests. The soldiers traveled in four-wheel drive vehicles donated by the United States.
The State Department declined to provide a detailed breakdown of U.S. counter-drug funding. But the country has recently received about $10 million to $20 million a year in military and police assistance from the United States, according to Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research group.
This is roughly the same amount as 10 years ago. Overall, Guatemala is one of the largest recipients of U.S. foreign assistance in Latin America.
Observers from the State Department, which has funded everything in Guatemala from border police training to elite anti-gang units, also accompanied the mission. He declined to comment, saying he was not authorized to speak to journalists.
The soldiers’ efforts were mostly fruitless, so they spent their time hanging out around the pickup truck and telling jokes. To spread goodwill, some food was distributed to villagers from food parcels. Others handed out cheap plastic toys to children.
But in a very poor area, where a mature opium poppy plant is worth about 25 quetzals (about $3.20), some villagers were clearly perturbed by the soldiers’ presence. Some refused to speak to anyone in the convoy, which was seen as eliminating one of their only sources of income.
“There are barely any poppies left here anymore,” said Ana Leticia Morales, a 26-year-old mother of two who makes a living selling gasoline smuggled from Mexico. “But the soldiers still come not to help us, but to make the situation worse.”
In Guatemala, Central America’s most populous country, tensions over eradication efforts have been high for decades. Traditionally grown in mountainous regions from Turkey to Pakistan, opium poppies also began appearing in Guatemala and parts of Mexico and Colombia decades ago.
Mexican cartels depended on Guatemalan farmers to grow poppies and turn them into opium gum. Smuggled across the border into Mexico, cartels converted the gum into heroin.
The United States initially responded by spraying herbicides on planes in Guatemala, but halted these efforts after the crews came under heavy fire. This paved the way for the ground operations carried out today.
Over the past decade, the emergence of fentanyl as a cheaper and more profitable source of income for cartels has upended Mexico’s poppy trade and had ripple effects in Central America. Now the cartels don’t have to worry about heavy rains that could ruin their harvest. You don’t have to worry about eradication either.
Eradicaters in Guatemala destroyed about 2,011 acres of opium poppies in 2017, up from just 7 acres in 2023, according to Guatemalan government figures.
The decline suggests Mexico is using chemicals imported from China to produce fentanyl in small labs about the size of a studio apartment, making fentanyl easier to manufacture in urban settings.
“It is easier to produce synthetic opioids in the laboratory than to rely on crops grown in remote mountains,” said Rigoberto Quemé, an anthropologist in poppy-growing regions of Guatemala. “Authorities are attacking the weakest link in the production chain,” he added, referring to eradication efforts. “But rather than disappearing, drug trafficking is still growing exponentially.”
In fact, Guatemala remains an important smuggling hub for another illegal drug, cocaine. It is also emerging as a place to grow coca, a plant used to make cocaine.
Drug Enforcement Administration officials in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States have already announced that Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation, two Mexican cartels competing for control of routes used to smuggle cocaine and opium gum out of Guatemala, are attempting to transport fentanyl chemical precursors to the United States. We are concerned that the same route could be used for this purpose. Mexico.
Last year, Guatemalan authorities arrested Ana Gabriela Rubio Zea, an entrepreneur known for flaunting her wealth on social media in connection with a scheme to import chemicals from China to manufacture fentanyl for Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. .
Rubio Zea, who ran a luxury clothing boutique in Cayala, an elite hub in Guatemala City, was extradited to the United States in July and faces charges of fentanyl distribution and money laundering, which carry a possible life sentence. Mexican authorities arrested Jason Antonio Yang López, a Guatemalan businessman in January who had been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for importing fentanyl precursor chemicals.
Guatemala’s new president, Bernardo Arévalo, is strengthening ties with the United States to combat the fentanyl trade. At an event attended by U.S. officials in March, he said his government was trying to improve methods to stem the trade in precursor chemicals from Guatemala.
But these efforts mean little to the villagers, who face declining demand for poppy on one hand and eradication programs on the other.
Regino García, a Mam leader in San Antonio Ixchiguán, said poppy prices began to plummet in 2017, eventually plummeting from 18,000 quetzals ($2,310) per kilo to 2,000 quetzals ($256).
“Poppy has helped many people make a living,” Mr. García said. Now, he said, the sharp drop in poppy prices has caused economic distress to the extent that “people are leaving for the United States before they run out of money.”
jodi garcia Contributing reporting from Guatemala City.
