Poppy, marijuana fields have sprung up throughout Mexico since the government cut agricultural subsidies
By Richard Parker
Journal Washington Bureau
VALLE DE CULIACAN, Mexico -- They grow everything in this rich valley.
Corn sprouts from the mocha-colored earth taller than a man on horseback. Lipstick-red tomatoes and full heads of lettuce reach across a hundred square miles, from the Sea of Cortez to the Sierra Madre.
These giant operations are precisely the kinds of farms Mexico's government has spent the 1990s encouraging. They are based on massive economies of scale, heavily irrigated and favored by government policy.
But increasingly, other crops are being cultivated along the edges of this valley: stubborn stands of marijuana and fragile plots of bright red poppy, eventually bound for the 600,000 heroin addicts in the United States.
Fifteen years ago, the drug crops of this region were confined to the uppermost reaches of the mountains, far from patrolling troops. Today, a brief helicopter flight just north of Culiacán reveals hundreds of Mexican troops burning drug crops along fertile river bottoms, not far from the suburbs.
The cultivation of marijuana and poppy has spread for many reasons. But one is the government agriculture policy, which has encouraged the large farms in the heart of the valley while slowly attempting to extinguish the small farms at the valley's edges and up in the Sierra Madre.
In 1992, after years of diminishing help, the government finally brought an end to a system of subsidies, government credit and a land tenure that dated back nearly 70 years.
Since the Mexico Revolution, the government had guaranteed land rights to small farmers of communally held lands, or ejidos. The government also furnished small farmers with help in irrigating their dry fields and provided price supports and credit. But during the Salinas administration, the government farm credit system was bankrupted.
And the rest of the supports for small farmers were stripped away as Mexico readied itself to enter the world of free trade. Wanting to make Mexican agriculture more competitive on the global market, the government favored large farms over small ones, even at the cost of withdrawing one of the cornerstones of its revolution: land, and with government help, life on the land for everyone.
Yet Mexico's 3.5 million small farmers have hung on.
They have dispatched their children to the cities, or to the United States, to work and send money home. They migrate for a few months to farm jobs, like those low down in the valley.
"Times are hard," says Milagros Rocha, one of thousands who descend from the mountains each year to pluck tomatoes bound for the giant Prinsa plant in Culiacán.
But many have hung on by growing the crops the troops and the helicopters seek out. If their fields, tucked in the folds of the foothills and valley ravines, remain undetected until harvest, the dried marijuana and opium gum is collected by low-ranking drug-dealers affiliated with drug cartels.
Then, under the cover of night, the heroin and marijuana are shipped north, often by trucks and cars racing through the backcountry with their headlights off.
With more and more farmers tending contraband crops, poppy and marijuana production has spread from the highlands and down the entire Pacific edge of Mexico.
Rochas says although she does not grow any illegal crops back home, she knows of others who do.
"We do," she says, "what we have to do to survive."
An end to aid
"Fifteen years ago, these (drug) plantations weren't here," says Army Gen. Gregorio Guerrero Caudillo, pointing out the open door of a UH-1H helicopter scouting for plots of poppy and marijuana.
"They were way up in the mountains," he continues. "Now they grow marijuana and poppy all year long. They grow out down low early in the year and as the year progresses they grow it higher and higher. And we follow them from down here in the spring up into the mountains in the summer."
But 15 years ago, when Guerrero was last posted to Sinaloa, Mexico's agricultural system was different. The government was sustaining meager farms with credit, price supports and help in irrigating the dry Mexican soil. The country still had a guaranteed land tenure system.
But the regime of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari brought all that to an end, replacing it with a program of welfare handouts, in the hopes that large, efficient farms would thrive and small ejidos would be bought up by private investors.
Small farmers were pitted against free market forces and powerful long-term trends, according to Bill DeWalt, director of Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Government investment in small farms had been declining and falling prices in the late 1980s made the global marketplace a hard place to compete.
"They were blaming the victims and saying they've failed. That meant privatizing the ejido, and allowing for rural land consolidation into more productive units," DeWalt said.
The predictions, at the time, were dire: Already successful farms, like those in the valley, would draw more investment capital and become more successful while millions of poor farmers would abandon the countryside for the cities.
Part of that prediction came true: Foreign money and loans from Mexican banks have helped large farms thrive. The farms of the valley grow vegetables for export to the United States and Canada.
But predictions of massive migration -- like the Dust Bowl emigration of the 1930s in the United States -- didn't come true.
The small farmers found ways to hang on -- in part by turning to contraband cash crops and through money sent by family members working elsewhere. Family members in Mexican and U.S. cities send home to the farms an estimated $6 billion a year, anywhere from a third to half the total economic output of the Mexican countryside, according to economist David Barkin.
"There's a massive private program to undermine the government's policies," says Barkin, who teaches at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City.
"You're talking about a huge amount of money. It's one of the reasons rural Mexico still exists."
No one came, though, to buy up the overworked lands of the ejidos, according to preliminary results of a study by DeWalt and two other researchers.
"The land market is exactly the same as it was before privatization," says Sarah Hamilton, a researcher on the study.
A prediction come true
The U.S. government knew the Salinas regime was running a risk: In 1993, the U.S. embassy in Mexico City prepared a classified analysis of the changes in Mexico's agriculture system and concluded they would lead to greater drug production.
The changes were viewed as "a necessary, if somewhat drastic, step designed to move Mexico toward modernization of its antiquated agricultural system," the study said.
"Increased illicit drug production will probably be a direct result of the discontinuation of subsistence crop subsidies, particularly in the southwest area of the country."
This prediction came true: Drug production spread from the states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango.
Today, marijuana is grown in such unlikely places as the Gulf state of Veracruz. High-grade marijuana is increasingly replacing low-grade pot. And the southwestern state of Guerrero has become the epicenter of the Mexican poppy trade, according to State Department figures, fueling a 33 percent increase in the country's poppy cultivation since the start of the decade.
"The agricultural economy in Michoacan has been devastated," says Lois Stanford, an anthropologist at New Mexico State University who returns to Michoacan each year. "There isn't any money to grow traditional export crops. The area in the Tierra Caliente has gone whole hog into marijuana production because there aren't any legal export crops to grow.
"The government's investment and help in processing isn't there as it was in the 1960s and 1970s," Stanford continues. "And the marijuana industry is filling the gap."
The explosive growth of drug crops is rapidly undermining rural society in Mexico, according to Stanford and others. Violence and terror are staples of the rural night in many regions. And poor farmers, according to Stanford, who've tried to obey the law can't help but notice the new pickups and gold chains of those who have not.
"You've got these people struggling to make a living," says Stanford. "And then right next door you've got these marijuanero rancheros with $1500 boots, drinking expensive whiskey and driving a brand new Ford."
Forced to choose
The economic choice boils down to risk.
The long leaf of the high-grade marijuana grown in Sinaloa is tough to the touch and as hardy as any range weed. With a little water it will grow almost anywhere with no help from a human hand.
The poppy, whose flower is as soft as any rose petal, requires plenty of water and constant attention. When it is ready to harvest, its bulb is carefully slashed with a razor so that it weeps the milk-colored gum that eventually becomes heroin.
Growing poppy is more dangerous because of heroin's higher price. And getting into the heroin business requires high-level protection from powerful members of society: big-time farmers with connections to police or politicians. As a result, the new high-grade marijuana taking root in Sinaloa is gradually replacing poppy as the predominant crop.
"This is an economic and social problem with deep roots in our society," says Oscar Loza Ochoa, director of the National Human Rights Commission in Sinaloa.
Since the end of World War II, Sinaloa has wrestled with the economics of drugs. The United States encouraged heroin production here during the war when its access to opiates for medicine was cut off by Japan.
After the war, peasants found they had a profitable crop.
A whole subculture of guns and drugs sprang up around the trade; in Culiacán today there stands a shrine to the patron "saint" of the marijuaneros. And Culiacán is the hometown of Mexico's most notorious cartel leader, Amado Carrillo-Fuentes.
As Mexican peasants struggle to deal with the forces of the marketplace, thousands migrate to Culiacán looking for jobs, primarily in agriculture.
The city of Culiacán itself has swelled from 25,000 at the end of World War II to 700,000. Many of its inhabitants are first- or second-generation city dwellers where nearly one in five workers are unemployed.
And the violent culture of the mountainside has transplanted itself into the city. More than 1,500 were murdered in Culiacán last year, mostly drug-related cases.
More than 100 have been killed so far this year, their hands and feet bound, their eyes blindfolded.
"A lot of our habits are out of rural areas," says Loza. "Our violence, our inability to talk."
Loza grew up in the village of Monteverde. And in the 1960s and 1970s, he could walk home at night from a dance without fear. Today, he says, he dares not.
"The government is destroying all these (marijuana and poppy) crops and that's fine. But since 1980 they've done nothing to help these farmers find some other way to make a living," Loza says. "One federal police commander even told me ... he knew he was taking food out of the peasants' mouths."
"The drug problem is very complex," says Lt. Col. Edgar Acata, a former army officer, recently brought in to command and clean up local police.
"Culiacán is not Sodom and Gomorrah," he said. "It's people who are forced to choose: between 300 pesos for their corn or more for something else."