Tuesday, July 11, 2000

I currently have 725 messages in my inbox and that doesn't count the incoming mail that is filtered to other folders. I intend to read it all eventually and I hate deleting stuff based just on the Subject alone, but I have to or I'd drown in the information deluge.

Here is a semi-random selection of something that is just sitting there waiting to be read:

Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 09:33:11 -0700
Reply-To: chiapas-l@burn.ucsd.edu
Sender: chiapas-l@burn.ucsd.edu
From: "Commandante Null MAF Rtd."
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Poppy Eradication a Perilous Job in Mexico

Feature-Poppy Eradication a Perilous Job in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Flying in pairs for safety, two helicopters swooped down low over well-hidden poppy fields guarded by figures in black carrying automatic rifles.

This time the pilots had nothing to fear; the armed men were from Operation Dragonfly, an anti-drug collaboration between Mexico's army and Attorney General's Office (PGR).

But usually the day-to-day fight against drugs in Mexico carries heavy risks.

"We get attacked a lot," said Lt. Col. Arnoldo Rios Salas, head of the PGR's drug eradication program, on a trip to two poppy plantations in the rugged southern state of Guerrero. "Narco-traffickers guarding fields of illicit crops shoot at us and hang wires between the trees to try to make our helicopters crash," he added.

Last year two pilots had a lucky escape when attachers hit their helicopter and bullets came whizzing through the door, missing one of them by an inch, Salas said. But normally the gunmen are long gone by the time the helicopters land

Mexico does not give figures for illicit crop cultivation, but the U.S. government estimates opium production in Mexico yields around four to six metric tons of heroin a year, nearly all of which is shipped to its northern neighbor. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency says Colombia supplies some 65 percent and Mexico 17 percent of the heroin consumed in the United States.

POPPY FIELDS WELL CAMOUFLAGED

>From the air, tiny scarlet dots of poppies can just be made out amid brown mountainous scrubland, although the fields are normally tucked between creeks or canyons. March is the peak season for opium poppies, from which heroin is made.

"The narcos choose remote places that are difficult to access for growing their crops," Salas said. Most often, they pick communal rather than private lands to avoid the risk of the owner being traced and the property seized.

Down on the ground, anti-drug agents begin whacking at the waist-high poppies with sticks, taking evident satisfaction in the felling of whole swathes of the plant within minutes. The two 1.2-acre fields, planted by locals from the isolated hill village of Carrizalillo, were ripe for harvest.

Some green poppy heads, now minus their petals, bore thin razor cuts still sticky from where the brown opium resin had been drawn. "You can get up to seven cuts in one bulb, but it's very fine work, which is why they use women and children to do it," Salas said. "The finer the cut, the more resin you get out."

Dotted in among the delicate red flowers were bushy clumps of marijuana, heavy with seeds, which the PGR said was for the personal use of the growers.

The poppy cycle from seed to harvest is on average 130 days. Salas estimated the locals had already harvested about one tenth of the field, fearing its imminent destruction.

After the plants are hewn down, helicopters spray them with insecticide to make sure the crop is dead. But a new crop could be sown within a week, said Jaime Cortes, head of PGR eradication in Guerrero state, looking every bit the tough cop in gold-rimmed shades, a baseball cap and jeans, and with a U.S. Colt AR-15 rifle at the ready.

IGNORANCE BEST WITH DRUG TRAFFICKERS

Cortes has been combating drugs in Mexico for 22 years, but he does not like to probe too hard into the identity of the drug traffickers he is fighting, he said.

"I prefer not to know who is doing this. They know where I live. Sometimes you can appear in your house dead," he said.

For impoverished communities such as Carrizalillo, growing drug crops is a chance to raise their meager income by a few pesos. And they know the penalty for squealing to the police is stiff, so there is virtually no cooperation with the PGR.

"The farmers live here permanently and everyone knows each other. They're not going to say anything about the traffickers as they are afraid," Cortes said.

Guerrero is Mexico's main poppy-growing state, although the drug crop is also cultivated in the northern states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua.

Popular myth has it that the United States ironically launched Mexico on the path of drug production, encouraging poppy planting during the Second World War and again during the Vietnam War in order to boost morphine supplies.

Now billionaires, Mexico's drug traffickers are notoriously effective at recruiting anti-drug officials. "Sometimes our people arrive and find a note pinned to a tree or under a rock saying 'Leave this field alone and we'll deposit x amount of dollars in your bank account,"' Salas said.

"But we change the beat of our agents frequently to avoid the possibility of them being corrupted," he added.

The PGR had a bumper year in drug eradication in 1999, reducing marijuana production to a record low and the opium poppy crop to a near-record low.

"Mexico's eradication program is one of the largest, most experienced and sophisticated in the world," a recent U.S. State Department report onMexico says.

Every time a drug plantation is wiped out, samples of the plants are taken back to the PGR lab for analysis to monitor the quality and strengths of the drugs being produced. But the drug traffickers keep pace with every advance.

"Normally each poppy plant has an average of eight bulbs but this year our scientists found a plant with 44 bulbs," Salas said. "That means the traffickers are improving the quality of their plants dramatically."

Copyright 1999 Reuters.

Sorry for the recycled content, although it's actually a pretty interesting short article (and I can now delete it from my inbox, since I've read it). I used to be much more well-versed in international politics and particularly Mexican politics than I am right now, simply because I haven't kept up with the stuff pouring in to my inbox. I suppose that happens to everyone. Every so often I start a purge of the contents, but even that ends up taking more time than usually have to work on it. What happens is that I'll start working on it and get sucked in to reading stuff along the way.

I recently unsubbed from a couple of listservs and ruthlessly emptied my mailboxes of unread messages. I wasn't reading them anyway, so I don't miss them. But these were the more frivolous lists. The serious stuff keeps piling up, mainly because I want to read it.

You should see the stacks of reading material around my house. It would be scary if I hadn't gotten everything neat and put away. The problem with that is that I am running out of room, so pretty soon I will have to do a purge of unread magazines (like a year's worth of Business Week... what the hell was I thinking when I subscribed to that? Oh yeah, some of the articles are interesting).
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