Guatemalan eradication reveals huge opium-poppy expansion
The government of Guatemala has reported a better-than-expected result from a major police-military operation to locate and eradicate opium poppy plantations in the northern department of San Marcos. The event has indirectly indicated that opium poppy cultivation, declared virtually eliminated by 1997, may have returned to a level similar to that of 1990.
The San Marcos operation, which took place in the last week on August, involved the deployment of 950 police officers and some 200 soldiers, and was accompanied by DEA agents. Guatemalan authorities say their US counterparts had expected a yield of about 10m poppy plants uprooted: the reported result was 17.5m, which raised the total eradicated since the beginning of the year to 27m. These are very rough estimates, as the eradicators obviously did not count the plants, which grow in relatively small plots, one by one. Past reports suggest that they have been calculating about 30,000 plants per hectare (a concentration significantly lower that that seen in Afghanistan). This would translate into the clearing of about 583 ha in San Marcos, and 900ha countrywide since the beginning of the year.
An intensive fumigation campaign launched in 1987, which reached a peak in 1990, when 1,085ha out of an estimated 1,930ha were sprayed, led to the virtual elimination of opium poppy plantations in Guatemala. By 1997 cultivation was estimated to have been reduced to about 10ha. During the Alfonso Portillo administration (2000-04) there was virtually no eradication; the specialised police unit created for that job, the Jaguares, was disbanded. In 2002 Guatemala was 'decertified' by the US as failing to cooperate fully in the antidrugs effort.
When President Óscar Berger took office in 2004, eradication was resumed, as cultivation had been reported expanding again. Whereas in 2003 only one hectare of poppy plantations was cleared, in 2004 the government reported the eradication of 181ha, out of an estimated total of 330ha. In 2005 the eradication effort slacked again, and only 48ha were cleared.
The results of the San Marcos operation suggest that the rebound of opium poppy cultivation has been far greater than imagined. Aerial surveillance conducted in spring 2005 revealed the existence of a number of small plots totalling 11-12ha, which was taken as indicative of a far greater level of cultivation, as persistent cloud cover in the canyons between the volcanos shields the crops, and the small size of the individual plantations make them hard to detect.
The Guatemalan authorities have been talking about a total cultivation area of 44 caballerías, equivalent to 1,980ha. They say the San Marcos sweep will have seriously disrupted the heroin market, as it was conducted just before harvest time. Locally stationed police officers, though, reckon that replanting will begin within a week at most, and is likely to restore the previous level of cultivation. In Guatemala the opium poppy plantations can yield up to three crops a year. In the absence of alternative development schemes, the lure of opium-poppy profitability is too great to resist: it provides incomes 12 to 14 times greater that those of other agricultural activities, and in San Marcos about 87% of the population lives on less than US$2 a day.
If the current unofficial estimates are correct, Guatemalan cultivation may have risen almost to the level of the diminished Colombian level (about 2,500ha in 2004) and to just over a third of the upper estimate for Mexico in 2004.