This is a story about globalization, capitalism and drugs, but also about hands eaten away by toil in the fields, failed harvests and dying communities: a story that can be traced back to the farmers who lived in the remote mountains of Guerrero, Mexico , growing poppies., even the fentanyl addicts who populate the corners of Los Angeles, USA. In a world endlessly interconnected, this ancient notion of chaos theory that the flutter of a butterfly in Hong Kong can translate into a hurricane in New York reaches the most unexpected corners of reality. Hard drugs are no exception.
Photographer César Rodríguez (Tepic, Nayarit, 39 years old) met the Sierra de Guerrero 15 years ago when he was working on evaluating shelters for indigenous peoples. He never stopped coming back. “The mountain has had a big impact on me. I would walk, take pictures, talk to people, get lost for a while,” he says on the phone. His camera roll was flooded with snapshots of those places where poppy cultivation was the center of economic, but also social and cultural life. A type of brown resin called gum is extracted from the flower, which, when dried, becomes heroin, a powerful, addictive, and deadly drug widely used in the United States and Canada — 90% of the product comes from Mexico Transportation was the main source of income for these cities for decades, until a new narcotic emerged that began to supplant the opioid market: fentanyl, a substance sweeping the streets of the United States and causing a serious public health crisis and diplomatic tensions between Mexico, the White House and China With the decline in heroin use came the decline, communities disintegrated, money disappeared, men migrated again. And there was Rodríguez to document it all in Red Mountain, considered one of the best photobooks of 2022 by the prestigious MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York.
“They harvest and farm to survive. I wanted to focus on the people: the traditions, the way of life there, their rituals… And I saw that everything revolves around the poppy: there are rituals for better rain; if it rains better, better harvest; they ask the priests to bless their fields; or they demand that the army not burn them down and cut down their fields; Parties are paid for with poppy money; Some people send their children to study abroad for the money of the poppy… The poppy is an economy for them.
A child rests in the Church of San Miguel Amoltepec, Guerrero César Rodríguez
Red Mountain is part of a larger project, an attempt to join forces between science and journalism to report on issues as complex as poppies and fentanyl. “From the beginning of our seasons in the mountains, people started saying, ‘The Chinese are exporting a new drug and the gringos don’t want heroin anymore.’ Everyone told you the story. People haven’t seen this poppy crisis in Mexico for a long time, but farmers had it very clearly, as a kind of macroeconomic intuition. It is very interesting how information circulates in an illegal market, how information from the streets in the United States ends up with the farmers of the Sierra de Guerrero,” Romain Le Cour, co-founder of Noria, one of the centers involved, reflects on the investigation.
“What César was trying to do with the book is to show that an illicit economy is fully embedded in everyday life,” continues Le Cour, a doctor of political science at the Sorbonne University. Rodríguez’s photographs depict Guerrero with the leisurely poetry of black and white: dirt roads lost in the mists of the mountains; humble huts, huts made of plastic and aluminum; stray dogs; women with very white hair and wrinkled faces in crumbling churches; peasants with sloping shoulders and weary eyes, cut from the same pattern of jeans, sandals and sombreros; old and calloused hands, tanned from dust, planting and harvesting, with the universal scars left by endless days of toil in the fields; planted with poppies in the solitude of the slopes, with these fine-stemmed flowers crowned by a ball reminiscent of the morphology of a scepter.
“The poppy was almost a subsidy”
Years ago, during the heroin boom, the United States paid 30,000 pesos per kilogram of poppy seed gum. With the fentanyl boom, the price dropped to 3,000 pesos per kilo, a figure that is far from profitable for farmers. “People told us, ‘I have poppy fields, but nobody buys me the gum.’ There is a vision that the drug is the most profitable product in the world, it cannot go into crisis, but what is documented in this project is the rather unprecedented economic crisis of a drug: it is a product that changes due to a macro transformation of the market, of the demand… It was a disaster for the farmers of Guerrero, Sinaloa, Nayarit or Durango, who for decades had dedicated themselves to the cultivation of poppies. It was the source of income,” explains Le Cour.
A girl in a poppy field in the mountains of Guerrero. Cesar Rodriguez
The poppy, the academic explains, was “almost a subsidy”. “It arose, settled, grew, spread, and in the hills and mountains people began to cultivate it even in the courtyard of their home, frankly very little hidden, although quite arbitrarily suppressed by the army. One generation passed the activity on to the next, making it possible to limit some emigration to the United States for a while. It allowed people to return to the communities, invest in the communities, and send their children to college. It was a very strong subsidy for very poor and very abandoned areas by the state.” But everything has an end.
—The power of the market has achieved what no public policy has achieved in 60 years: people have stopped planting.
Without the poppies, the source of income dried up. Mountain people migrated north again to the United States or Mexican cities to send remittances home. Many others had to go back to work as day laborers and sell their days for miserable wages. “There is a very strong impoverishment of communities that were already very poor. At the moment we are unable to assess the impact, but there is an incredible opportunity to reintegrate these people into legitimate economies for a gift that the economy has given the Mexican government by removing the poppies,” Le argues court
One hand, two bullets
Since Rodríguez started going to the mountains, the landscape has changed. Now many farmers let the flowers rot in the fields for lack of buyers. Others hold on to a small rate hike. Very few have already started to switch to avocado or lemon cultures. The photographer tells the story of a man who, thanks to the poppy, was able to send his two oldest children to university. The third was not so lucky: he wanted to study computer science, but when he was old enough his savings disappeared and he had to stay in the village and help his father with the harvest.
Violence is also a specter that haunts communities. Criminal groups who want to take control of the business threaten the peace in the mountains. Self-defense groups were formed in the villages, made up of the peasants themselves. “When we went the area was very devoid of posters, they just wanted to buy the product but the last time we were there the posters were already starting to come in. They told us that a city is surrounded by cities that are ruled by the cartel: you get locked up, the kids don’t go to high school because it’s in other competing cities. You seem to be calm there, a shot can be heard here, another one here, bursts,” says Rodríguez.
Hand of the leader of a self-defense group from the Guerrero mountains, murdered a year after the photo was taken.
There is a photo in the book that illustrates the problem. It’s an old hand, dusty, with dirt between its nails. In the palm of the hand it shows two balls. It belonged to the leader of a self-defense group. “A year after he took the picture, he was murdered. It was very tough,” says Rodríguez. It wasn’t just bad memories, though. “I’m still in contact with some: some of the young people in the photos have emigrated to California, I have yet to visit them with their copies of the books. They work wet and send us memes and videos working on the strawberry.”
Farmers who emigrate to continue being farmers. Communities dying from the changes in market dynamics. Drugs going out of fashion and public health crises that follow one another. Photographs to show dropouts.
The photographer César Rodríguez.Victoria Will
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