Fentanyl upends Guatemala’s time-worn opium trade
Cartels shift to drug easier to produce, move
SAN MARCOS, Guatemala — The convoy rolled out of the military base before dawn into the mountains straddling Guatemala’s border with Mexico. Its mission: destroy opium poppies used to make heroin.
Armed with rifles and machetes, the caravan’s nearly 300 soldiers and police officers from elite counternarcotics units scaled steep hillsides and waded through bone-chilling streams. They chased leads from drone pilots and inhaled dust as they rode in the back of pickup trucks barreling down dirt roads.
But after scouring village after village, they found only tiny plots of poppies here and there — a fraction of the region’s cultivation in previous years.
“The land here used to be covered in poppies,” said Ludvin López, a police commander, as soldiers fanned out around Ixchiguán, an area of remote hamlets populated by speakers of Mam, a Mayan language. But that was before opium prices plunged from $64 an ounce to about $9.60, he added.
The largely fruitless search for opium poppies in Guatemala over several days in March laid bare a seismic 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 of how cheaply and easily Mexican cartels can produce the synthetic opioid in makeshift labs using chemicals from China. Fentanyl is so potent that it can be smuggled in small quantities hidden in vehicles, another advantage over heroin.
As a result, demand for opium poppies has plunged.
In Guatemala, poppy farmers are losing their primary income from what had been their only cash crop, forcing many in poverty-stricken areas to migrate to the United States. At the same time, local and international authorities fear that Guatemala could emerge as a new hub for trading in the chemicals used to make fentanyl.
Drug busts along the United States-Mexico border also showcase heroin’s decline. In the 2023 fiscal year, US Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations seized 1,500 pounds of heroin, down from 5,400 pounds in 2021.
Seizures of fentanyl in the same period more than doubled to 27,000 pounds, up from about 11,000 pounds.
Even as fentanyl lays waste to the heroin trade and counternarcotics priorities shift, US authorities say that US support for poppy eradication efforts, though limited, is still needed in Guatemala to counter the reach of Mexican cartels that produce heroin.
Still, the highest priority in Guatemala now is combating synthetic drugs and the detection of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, said a State Department official who was not authorized to be identified discussing drug interdiction strategies.
Tensions around eradication efforts have flared for decades in Guatemala, Central America’s most populous country. Mexican cartels relied on Guatemalan farmers to grow the poppies and then turn them into opium gum. Smuggled across the border into Mexico, the cartels would transform the gum into heroin.
The United States initially responded by spraying herbicides from planes in Guatemala, but suspended those efforts after flight crews came under concentrated gunfire. This opened the way for the ground operations practiced today.
Fentanyl’s emergence over the past decade as a cheaper and much more profitable source of income for the cartels upended the poppy trade in Mexico while producing spillover effects in Central America. Now, the cartels don’t need to worry about heavy rains, which can destroy harvests. They also don’t need to worry about eradication efforts.
Eradicators in Guatemala destroyed about 2,011 acres of opium poppies in 2017 compared with just 7 acres in 2023, Guatemalan government figures show.
The decline speaks to the ease in Mexico of using chemicals imported from China to produce fentanyl in small labs about the size of a studio apartment, making it ideal for being manufactured in urban settings.
“It’s easier to produce a synthetic opioid in a laboratory than relying on a crop grown in remote mountains,” said Rigoberto Quemé, an anthropologist from the poppy-growing region of Guatemala.
Guatemala’s new president, Bernardo Arévalo, is strengthening ties with the United States in a bid to respond to the fentanyl trade. In a ceremony in March attended by US officials, his government said it was trying to improve ways to combat the trade in precursor chemicals.
But such efforts mean little for villagers confronting fading demand for poppies on the one hand, and eradication programs on the other.
“Poppies used to help a lot of people make ends meet,” said Regino García, a Mam leader from Ixchiguán. Now, he said, the steep decline in poppy prices inflicted so much pain that “before the money runs out, people depart for the United States.”