Opium Poppies Offer Small Growers a Living and Cartels a Lucrative Business

CHILPANCINGO, Mexico - Mario moves quickly and easily down the steep forested hill. After a 30-minute descent the tree cover clears, and the sun shines down onto the hidden red and purple f lowers dotting the hillsides in the Filo Mayor mountains.

Producers here in Mexico's Guerrero state call their clandestine poppy plots "gardens." What they raise there is highly marketable, and illicit.

Many of the flowers have no petals; they are simply plump, graying bulbs full of opium, ready for slicing.

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High-End Imports, Home Cultivation Increasing

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Once upon a time, Mexican marijuana was the gold standard for U.S. pot smokers. But in the new world of legal markets and gourmet weed, aficionados here are looking to the United States and Europe for the good stuff.

Instead of Acapulco Gold, Mexican smokers want strains like Liberty Haze and Moby Dick - either importing high-potency boutique pot from the United States, or growing it here in secret gardens that use techniques perfected abroad.

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It Was Supposed to Be One of the Biggest Blows to Cartels in Decades, So Why, Asks Jo Tuckman in Culiacan, Has Little Apparently Changed

The fortune-teller smiled as she gazed towards the distant peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range.

"The mountains are glowing red, and it will be a good harvest," she predicted. The forecast was not based on second sight, however, but on conversations with local farmers looking forward to a bumper crop of marijuana.

This is Mexico's own golden triangle. Straddling the northern states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, the Sierra has been a stronghold of the country's drug trade for as long as anyone can remember: its deep canyons and dense pine forests have harboured generations of narcos and hidden plantations of marijuana and opium poppies.

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SIERRA MADRE DEL SUR, MEXICO (AP) - Red and purple blossoms with fat, opium-filled bulbs blanket the remote creek sides and gorges of the Filo Mayor mountains in the southern state of Guerrero.

The multibillion-dollar Mexican opium trade starts here, with poppy farmers so poor they live in woodplank, tin-roofed shacks with no indoor plumbing.

Mexican farmers from three villages interviewed by the Associated Press are feeding a growing addiction in the U.S., where heroin use has spread from back alleys to the cul-de-sacs of suburbia.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) - Officials said Wednesday that a drug gang implicated in the disappearance of 43 students in a southern city essentially ran the town, paying the mayor hundreds of thousands of dollars a month out of its profits from making opium paste to fuel the U.S. heroin market.

The statements painted the fullest picture yet of the control that is exercised by gangs over a broad swath of Mexico's hot lands in Guerrero state. The Guerreros Unidos cartel's deep connections with local officials in the city of Iguala came to a head Sept. 26 when the mayor ordered municipal police to detain protesting students, who were then turned over to the drug gang.

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Report Recommends Treating Drug Abuse as Public-Health Problem

MEXICO CITY--A commission composed mostly of former world leaders will recommend Tuesday that governments move beyond legalizing marijuana and decriminalize and regulate the use of most other illegal drugs, including heroin and cocaine.

The international drug-control system is broken, says a report to be released Tuesday in New York by the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Governments should be allowed wide latitude to experiment with the regulation of drugs, except for the most lethal, says the commission, whose 21 members include former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, and former presidents such as Brazil's Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo and Colombia's Cesar Gaviria.

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Alfonso Hernandez stands before a mural of Jesus Christ being ferried on a lion-drawn carriage, trailed by Catholic bishops and priests. Behind them, scores of men in crisp suits - some smiling, some somber, one in dark shades - kneel as they watch the procession.

They are among the dead of Tepito.

"It's called the mural of the absent. They're people from here," said Hernandez, a native of the famously tough - and famously untamable - Mexico City neighborhood. "These are people who died because of the drug wars. This is to remember them here and not just in the crime blotter of the newspapers."

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MEXICO CITY- As the last class was finishing at the school in northeast Mexico, the four pupils grabbed 12-year-old Hector Alejandro Mendez by his arms and legs and swung him, banging his head against the wall.

Mendez - "Mini," to his friends - made it home, where he told his mother about the assault before losing consciousness.

He died a week later. The injuries had caused fatal bleeding in his brain.

At his funeral, weeping family and friends wore white T-shirts with messages to the departed child. "Alejandro, we always love you," said the epistle from his mother. "Justice for my baby."

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MEXICO CITY - Mexico and the United States cannot pursue diverging policies on marijuana legalization, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto was quoted as saying Sunday, hinting he may be open to following the lead taken by some U.S. states in changing drug laws.

Political pressure has grown in Mexico to take a more liberal stance on marijuana since Washington and Colorado decided to legalize possession and sale of the drug for recreational use in 2012.

Other U.S. states plan votes soon.

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APATZINGAN, Mexico - Sporting a semiautomatic assault rif le and a "213" area code tattoo, Cuauhtemoc Espejo boarded the passenger bus and checked riders' IDs.

Espejo, who returned to Mexico's Tierra Caliente from California's Central Valley a few years ago, is a member of one of the vigilante bands that in recent months took over large parts of Michoacan state dominated for nearly a decade by drug and extortion cartels.

"There is a lot of fear, uncertainty now," Espejo said as he made sure nobody from the notorious Knights Templar gang was on the bus.

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The Likely Successor Has Much in Common With Guzman, but He Shuns the Spotlight.

MEXICO CITY - With the arrest of Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the leadership of Mexico's largest and most sophisticated illegal drug operation has probably transferred to Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, a 66-yearold former farmer with a knack for business - and maintaining a low profile.

But Zambada is likely to discover, much as Guzman did, that inheriting the throne of top capo comes with a series of complications worthy of a Shakespearean king.

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Mexico City - Deep in the heart of the Tepito the traditional home of Mexico City's black market Juan, a marijuana dealer, says: "Sure, you make money in this business. But it is a very stressful job."

That job might be heading for a big transformation after left-wing legislators tabled measures to relax regulations on marijuana possession and sale in the capital, as well as proposals for federal reforms that could increase permitted quantities and encourage other states to follow suit.

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MEXICO CITY - Leftist lawmakers in Mexico City's legislature introduced a bill Thursday that would legalize the sale of marijuana within the capital, expanding on a national law that already decriminalizes the possession by users of small amounts of pot throughout the country.

It wasn't immediately clear how wide support was for the idea within the local assembly, which is controlled by the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, but Mayor Manuel Mancera backed the idea, and the legislature is one of the most liberal in Mexico.

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Political Challenges Await Bills to Partially Decriminalize Pot

MEXICO CITY - Lawmakers in Mexico introduced bills Thursday that would create marijuana dispensaries in the capital and increase the amount of the drug people across the country could carry for personal use.

The proposals to Mexico City's Legislative Assembly and the federal legislature would amount to a partial decriminalization of marijuana, advocates said, not full legalization.

The Mexico City bill would instruct police and judges to deprioritize the prosecution of marijuana violations under some circumstances. It would create "dissuasion commissions" to which some violators could be sent for administrative sanctions, in lieu of the traditional criminal court process.

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But Bills Introduced in the Mexico City and National Legislatures Face a Tough Fight.

MEXICO CITY - Lawmakers in Mexico introduced bills Thursday that would create marijuana dispensaries in the capital and increase the amount of the drug people across the country could carry for "personal use."

The proposals to Mexico City's Legislative Assembly and the federal Congress would amount to a partial "decriminalization" of marijuana, advocates said, not full legalization.

The Mexico City bill would instruct police and judges to deprioritize the prosecution of marijuana violations in some circumstances.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) - After months of tacit cooperation with rural vigilantes trying to drive out a cultlike drug cartel, the Mexican government is seeking to permanently solve one of its toughest security problems with a plan to legalize the growing movement and bring it under the army's control. But the risks are high. To succeed, the government must enforce military discipline and instill respect for human rights and due process among more than 20,000 heavily armed civilians, then eventually disband them and send them back home in the western state of Michoacan.

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Mexico City, Mexico - After months of tacit co-operation with rural vigilantes trying to drive out a cult-like drug cartel, the Mexican government has moved to permanently solve one of its toughest security problems with a plan to legalize the growing movement and bring it under the army's control.

But the risks are high.

To succeed, the government must enforce military discipline and instil respect for human rights and due process among more than 20,000 heavily armed civilians before returning them home to the western state of Michoacan.

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MEXICO CITY - Federal authorities rushed Monday to head off a mini-civil war in the "hot land" of Mexico's Michoacan state, urging rural vigilantes to lay down their arms and go home rather than attempt to seize a city of 90,000 that has become a stronghold of a drug cartel calling itself the Knights Templar.

The armed peasant groups emerged last year to fight off the cartel, which had metastasized throughout the southwestern state, coordinating the lucrative methamphetamine trade and extortion rackets and wielding significant control over the major container port of Lazaro Cardenas. Until recently, the self-defense groups had been largely tolerated, if not encouraged, by President Enrique Pena Nieto's administration, which had allowed them to staff some roadblocks alongside federal police and soldiers.

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Tixtla - Newly formed militias worry criminal gangs - and authorities, who fear they may become a rebel force

With their scuffed shoes, baggy trousers and single shot hunting guns, the eight men preparing to patrol their hillside barrio in the southern Mexican town of Tixtla hardly looked like a disciplined military force. But this motley collection of construction workers and shopkeepers claim to have protected their community from Mexico's violent drug cartels in a way the police and military have been unable or unwilling to do.

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The Ex-President Is an Unlikely Champion of Legalizing Marijuana.

SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico - Former President Vicente Fox grew up on a farm here in rural Guanajuato, one of Mexico's most conservative states. He is the kind of guy who wears big belt buckles, collects handtooled saddles and worships the free market.

Ask him about his experience with the drug culture and the big man with the cowboy-movie mustache exhibits a kind of strait-laced pique: Never smoked pot, he says. Hardly knew anyone who did.

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