How Fentanyl Laid Waste to Guatemala’s Time-Worn Opium Trade

The convoy rolled retired of the subject basal earlier dawn into the mist-shrouded mountains straddling Guatemala’s borderline with Mexico. Its mission: destruct opium poppies utilized to marque heroin.

Armed with rifles and machetes, the caravan’s astir 300 soldiers and constabulary officers from elite counternarcotics units scaled steep hillsides and waded done bone-chilling streams. They chased leads from drone pilots and inhaled particulate arsenic they rode successful the backmost of pickup trucks barreling down washboard ungraded roads.

But aft scouring colony aft village, they recovered lone tiny plots of poppies present and determination — a fraction of the region’s cultivation successful erstwhile years.

“The onshore present utilized to beryllium covered successful poppies,” said Ludvin López, a constabulary commander, arsenic soldiers fanned retired astir Ixchiguán, an country of distant hamlets populated by speakers of Mam, a Mayan language. But that was earlier opium prices plunged from $64 an ounce to astir $9.60, helium added.

The mostly fruitless hunt for opium poppies successful Guatemala implicit respective days successful March laid bare a seismic displacement successful Latin America’s cause trade.

In the United States, the world’s largest marketplace for illicit drugs, fentanyl has mostly displaced heroin due to the fact that of however cheaply and easy Mexican cartels tin nutrient the synthetic opioid successful makeshift labs utilizing chemicals from China. Fentanyl is truthful potent that it tin beryllium smuggled successful tiny quantities hidden successful vehicles, different vantage implicit heroin.