JUQUILA YUCUCANI (Reuters) — In the mountains of Mexico's tropical sierra, an ever-growing expanse of pink poppy flowers has pushed prices so low for opium paste, the gummy raw ingredient of heroin, that farmer Santiago Sanchez worries how he will feed and clothe his family.
The area of Mexico that illegally farms opium poppies grew by more than one-fifth last year, to an area the size of Philadelphia, according to a UN-backed study published in November.
That, along with a trend toward mixing synthetic opiate fentanyl in Mexico's tarry black heroin, has slashed what criminal gangs pay farmers like Sanchez for a kilo of opium. Now, Sanchez earns about $260 per kilo, a fifth of the average price two years ago.
While Mexico's top drug traffickers still make billions of dollars supplying US addicts, at the bottom of the supply chain, the villagers are hardly surviving.
"We can't keep living like this," said Sanchez, who is a local leader in the remote Mixtec Indian village of Juquila Yucucani, where hundreds of poppy farmers have seen already meager incomes shrivel. "We can barely afford our food."
Inside Mexico's heroin trade
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In the United States, overdose deaths from opioids have increased almost six-fold in the past two decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 15,000 people died of heroin overdoses in 2017 alone.
Heroin from Mexico accounted for 86% of the heroin found on US streets, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency's most recent annual narcotic report.
The heart of illegal poppy cultivation is in the hills of Guerrero state, in some of the poorest mountain districts — such as Juquila Yucucani, some 800 miles south of the US-Mexican border. Guerrero is now among the country's bloodiest states.
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