A Mexican Army helicopter flies over the green mountains of the state of Guerrero where the military discovered a coca crop, an unusual finding until a few years ago that reveals how the cartels adapt to changes in the million-dollar business of drug trafficking.
For years, marijuana and poppy crops –raw material for heroin– have been the livelihood of thousands of poor peasants in Guerrero, in southern Mexico, key to drug trafficking due to its agricultural vocation and access to Pacific ports such as Acapulco.
But the advent of deadly fentanyl sent prices of opium gum made from opium poppies plunging as the United States focused its efforts on the synthetic drug, 50 times more potent than heroin and causing tens of thousands. of deaths per year.
This has led traffickers to experiment with the coca leaf, whose cultivation is historically concentrated in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. The latter country supplies two thirds of cocaine, with a world volume that reached 2,000 tons in 2021, according to experts.
“It is an activity that had not been detected before (…), in a month and a half we have located 27 plantations,” says Cavalry Colonel Carlos Javier Pérez, who heads the unit in charge of destroying coca in the area.
Even so, the Mexican crops are incipient, with some 360,000 m2 of surface eradicated in the last four years.
“Organized crime groups are trying to diversify their activities and it is an experiment with the coca plantation,” added Pérez, as his men uprooted the bushes by hand and then burned them in the town of Atoyac de Álvarez.
Cocaine also continues to be enormously profitable: the price of a kilo can go from $1,000 in its place of origin to $38,000 in Europe.
Also Central America
In a context in which Mexican cartels have come to control almost the entire trafficking chain in Colombia, coca crops are also flourishing in Honduras and Guatemala, once just transit points for the drug from South America.
According to Honduran authorities, since 2017 the drug traffickers began to finance these crops, while in 2021 in Guatemala 1.7 million plants were destroyed.
In the Mexican case “it has to do with the production of fentanyl that comes from China. This was already seen coming from the last decade, there was a drop in prices (of opium gum) and it is no coincidence that coca cultivation has begun,” explains Libertad Argüello, a specialist from the Colegio de México.
According to the Insight Crime organization, the powerful cartels and other Mexican gangs are the main suppliers of fentanyl for the US market, a highly lucrative contraband that is less risky due to the ease of transporting it across the border due to its lower volume.
In February 2021, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged for the first time that criminal groups were experimenting with coca crops and that his government had launched an investigation.
The field discovered in Guerrero was one hectare in size and had a small irrigation system. A few meters away, an abandoned laboratory was also found, as well as tools, chemicals, gasoline, and the clothes of those in charge.
To destroy the crops, the military traveled about 25 minutes on rough roads in all-terrain vehicles, and another half hour on foot through dense vegetation and streams.
Colonel Pérez explains that the soldiers must walk in because from the air it is almost impossible to see the bushes, which are 1.30 meters tall.
root of new problems
In the laboratory where the base paste was produced, there is still a sleeping bag, blankets and a cap belonging to the workers, who according to the military fled in the presence of the troops.
From these places, the paste obtained by mixing chopped leaves with lime, cement, gasoline and ammonium sulfate is usually taken to other facilities to be transformed into cocaine, the officer explains.
For Insight Crime, Mexico is far from shadowing Colombia, with some 204,000 hectares of coca in 2021, according to the UN.
Its specialists believe that possibly techniques are being tested in Mexico to adapt the plant, which is produced at a much lower altitude in Colombia and Peru.
But “although coca cultivation levels remain low, the gradual increase and Guerrero’s history of illicit crops could be sources of problems in the state,” the foundation warns in a report.
In addition to the poverty in which 66 percent of its 3.5 million inhabitants live, Guerrero suffers from the violence of drug trafficking. In 2022 it registered 1,360 intentional homicides.
After leaving the contingent in charge of incinerating the bushes on the ground, Colonel Pérez shows photos on a cell phone where he only sees disturbed earth where there used to be coca. “This is how it should be,” he says.
AFP/Mexico
The US also warns about crops in Venezuela
In addition to Mexico and Central America, the US government revealed this week, in a report to that country’s congress, that the Maduro regime is increasingly dependent on the drug business for its livelihood. “Increasing evidence of coca cultivation and cocaine production in domestic drug laboratories suggests that Venezuela is now a producing country for illicit drugs, as well as a transit country,” the report says. It adds that “the regime’s lack of cooperation in international drug control, the usurpation of the judicial system, military and security services for illicit purposes, public corruption and cooperation with non-state armed actors and criminal elements provided the ideal conditions for drug trafficking operations and associated violence”.
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