Four decades later, poppy fields forever

JOSEPH N. BELL

I read the long, pictorial article in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times

about the growing opium trade in Afghanistan with a special interest.

I wrote an article 38 years ago that dealt with an identical problem

a lot closer to home. Different times, different countries, but the

plight of the farmers and the enormous difficulties in stopping this

trade haven’t changed very much in all those years. We learn slowly,

and sometimes not at all.

I got involved with this story in 1967 when the editor of Today’s

Health, the magazine of the American Medical Assn., called me to say

they had discovered that a corps of American narcotics agents and

several helicopters had been sent to Mexico to work with that country

in finding and destroying fields of opium poppies that were being

converted to heroin and smuggled into the United States.

The Mexican government, after a long delay, had agreed to allow us

inside the story, so I met photographer Shel Hershorn -- whose

photograph of President John Kennedy being wheeled into Parkland

Hospital had appeared on the cover of Life Magazine -- in Mexico

City. For two days we were briefed by officials of the Mexican

Federal Police before they sent us to the operational headquarters in

Culiacan -- about 1,000 miles south of the border at Nogales. There,

we were met by a half dozen Mexican narcotics agents who had just

returned from three months in the field -- and thus began the wildest

week I’ve ever spent in six decades of journalism.

At dawn the next morning, after a sleepless night celebrating with

the agents, we were flown to a military base an hour inland, where

our Cessna landed on a dirt airstrip pocked with rocks at the base of

a range of mountains. When we were transferred to a helicopter, I

wondered about the two blankets and two canteens that were pitched in

with us, but my questions were shrugged off. For the next three

hours, we dodged in and around and between mountains while a genial

Mexican Air Force lieutenant pointed out fields of stark green in the

sun-baked brown hills below.

The green patches were opium poppy fields -- amapola -- planted by

farmers who were supplied seeds by drug traffickers. The farmers

would walk several days into the mountains to find a suitable place,

ideally tucked out of view from above, to plant and cultivate the

seeds. When the pilot spotted a poppy field, he would radio its

location to one of the 25 squads of soldiers stationed in the

mountains below, and they would march in and destroy it. While the

pilot explained all this, Hershorn was busy photographing the fields.

Late in the morning, our pilot began watching the ground

carefully. When he saw a flash of light reflected off a mirror, he

put the helicopter down on a nearby rocky mesa. As we got out, a

half-dozen soldiers appeared over the edge of the mesa and talked for

a few minutes in animated Spanish with the pilot. He then told us

cheerfully, “You go with them,” handed us the blankets and canteens,

got back in the helicopter and took off.

For the next three days, we walked, ate, slept, sweated and froze

with heat that reached 100 degrees during the day and plummeted well

below freezing at night. Hershsorn and I were both wearing slacks and

loafers. Our copious day-time sweat turned to ice in our thin

blankets at night. Our companions were 25 soldiers under the command

of a captain and one lieutenant. None of them spoke English, but

necessity motivated us to learn how to communicate across that

barrier. Our most frequent question, accompanied by flapping of arms

and pointing to the sky, was, “When is the bird coming back?” This

always convulsed the soldiers, who answered with shrugs.

There were two civilians in the group. A farmer who was acting,

under duress, as a guide, and an inscrutable, emaciated man whom, we

learned, was suspected of having shot a soldier from a distant hill

and was being held prisoner until he could be sent back to

civilization for trial. He glowered a lot.

I have no idea how far we walked in the next few days -- Hershorn

with seven cameras strung about his neck after refusing an offer from

the captain to let the prisoner carry them. We busted up a half-dozen

amapola fields and destroyed the shelters and irrigation systems the

farmers who planted them had constructed. The irrigation systems were

technical wonders, carefully balanced networks of trenches and wooden

pipes sometimes a mile in length. I was always conscious that the guy

who created this engineering feat was probably hidden on a nearby

hillside, cradling a gun, watching us destroy his handiwork, and

getting very angry.

The captain picked one of these lovely purplish flowers, peeled

back the petals and showed us how raw opium is extracted by cutting a

fine incision across the face of the bulb and squeezing out drops of

a gummy liquid. The farmer doesn’t do this. He simply grows and

harvests the flowers and sells the crop for a tiny fraction of what

it will bring on the narcotics market.

This hasn’t changed in four decades. The farmer does the work,

benefits the least and takes most of the risk. The people who process

the opium and the traffickers who sell it have the security of money

and power. They have bribed public officials and promised to kill the

families of farmers who identify them -- and sometimes farmers who

are reluctant to plant their seeds. So the traffickers prosper, and

the farmers go to jail. That’s still the way it is in the poppy

fields of Afghanistan -- and the exploitation of the powerless in so

many other ways in the world today. Nibbling at the roots helps, but

only making the trade unprofitable for the exploiters will ever have

any real impact.

Oh, yes, we were rescued on the fourth day. Overrun with fleas

from spreading our blankets in barnyards. Smelling like a

meat-packing plant. Chilled and exhausted, our tongues parched from

trying to resist the drinking water drawn from foul streams. When the

helicopter appeared in the sky that day, it was the most beautiful

sight I’d ever seen. And last Sunday in the Times, I lived it all

over again.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.