Sierra Madre Occidental
More actions
| Sierra Madre Occidental | |
|---|---|
| ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000 | |
| Location | |
| Coordinates | 26.27, -107.44 |
| Country | Mexico |
| Provinces/States | Sinaloa,Chihuahua (state),Durango,Sonora |
| Area | 58,800 km² |
| Growing history | |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
The Sierra Madre Occidental growing region covers the mountain municipalities of north-western Mexico that the sources name for the growing or destruction of drug crops, cannabis among them. They lie in the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Durango and Sonora. The historian Adela Cedillo calls the part of the range where Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua meet "the so-called Golden Triangle". In her account it is the country's leading producer of marijuana and poppy and the scene of anti-drug campaigns since the 1940s.[1]: 2 The region is drawn on 13 municipalities of the range that the sources name, from Álamos in Sonora to Guanaceví in Durango. The range itself runs on south into Zacatecas, Nayarit and Jalisco,[2]: 352 which the region does not take in.
Geography
The Sierra Madre Occidental is the largest mountain system in Mexico. It runs for almost 1,200 km from north-eastern Sonora, at 30°35′ N, to northern Jalisco, at 21°00′ N, where it joins the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, and is more than 200 km wide in places.[2]: 351, 356 Its mean elevation is 2,500 m. The highest summits are in Durango, among them Cerro Gordo at 3,347 m, except Mohinora (3,307 m) in the south-west of Chihuahua.[2]: 357
The western side of the range falls steeply towards the Pacific. Canyons cut into it, some more than 1,800 m deep: they are called barrancas in Sonora and Chihuahua and quebradas in Durango and Sinaloa, and they include the canyons of Urique in Chihuahua and of the Humaya and Tamazula on the Durango–Sinaloa border. The Yaqui, Mayo, Fuerte and Humaya are among the rivers that drain the range to the Pacific.[2]: 357 Pine, pine–oak and mixed conifer forest covers the main mass of the sierra. Tropical deciduous forest and subtropical scrub grow along its western foot and run up into it along the canyons.[2]: 351
Cedillo writes that the rugged mountains have sheltered the drug economy, and that the lack of roads and communications has hampered policing.[1]: 2 Before Operation Condor the sierra was thinly settled, in hamlets (rancherías) of 20 to 100 people.[1]: 25 The lawyer and anthropologist Fátima Valdivia writes that the part of the range that crosses Chihuahua is called the Sierra Tarahumara, after the Rarámuri or Tarahumara, the most numerous of the state's four Indigenous peoples.[3]
Name and extent
Cedillo writes that the "Golden Triangle" is also called the Golden Quadrilateral when Sonora is counted with it.[1]: 2 The eradication campaigns of the 1970s drew their own lines. The campaign called Trizo, from November 1975, made Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango its Zone I.[1]: 7 In Operation Condor, from 1977, the Golden Triangle was Zone VI. More than 20,000 people of the highlands were said to grow 70 per cent of the marijuana and poppy produced in Mexico there.[1]: 9
The military task force of Operation Condor had its base at Badiraguato. Its jurisdiction, of about 80,000 km², included Choix, Sinaloa de Leyva, Badiraguato and Culiacán in Sinaloa, Guadalupe y Calvo, Morelos and Batopilas in Chihuahua, and Tamazula and Canelas in Durango. It later reached more municipalities of the three states and of Sonora.[1]: 15 In the army files that hold the complaints highlanders brought against the task force from 1977 to 1986, the municipalities that stand out as most affected are Badiraguato, Guadalupe y Calvo, Tamazula, Morelos, Urique, Batopilas, Topia, Canelas and Guanaceví.[1]: 23
In 1989 a United States intelligence report placed Mexico's major growing areas principally in the western states, among them Chihuahua, Sonora and Sinaloa.[4]: 66 Data that the Secretariat of National Defense gave to the newspaper Milenio showed that in 2014 seven of the ten municipalities where the army destroyed the largest areas of marijuana were in Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango; Álamos in Sonora was another.[5] The region is drawn on Choix, Sinaloa de Leyva and Badiraguato in Sinaloa, Guadalupe y Calvo, Morelos, Batopilas, Urique and Guachochi in Chihuahua, Tamazula, Canelas, Topia and Guanaceví in Durango, and Álamos in Sonora. Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, lies outside it.
Cultivation history
Before Operation Condor
Valdivia dates the planting of marijuana and poppy in the Sierra Tarahumara to the end of the 1960s. She writes that it soon became the main source of income for the mestizo people of the old mining districts.[3] Cedillo writes that Sinaloa was the economic centre of the drug industry. By the early 1970s several family-based groups, which she calls clans, were competing there for the trade.[1]: 3
Under Operation Canador, the Mexican name for the joint campaign begun with the United States in 1969, the army sent about 5,000 soldiers to the country's drug-growing zones to destroy the crops by hand.[1]: 6 Trizo, from 15 November 1975, used helicopters to carry troops to the fields and began spraying the crops with herbicides such as paraquat and 2,4-D, with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) taking part.[1]: 7–8
Operation Condor, 1977–1987
Operation Condor began in Culiacán on 16 January 1977. The first phase of its task force had 1,200 troops.[1]: 14 In February 1977 its coordinator said that the army had destroyed 720 illegal fields and seized 121 tonnes of marijuana.[1]: 16 The governor of Sinaloa claimed in December 1977 that the operation had almost cleared the state of drug crops. In his account the 12 per cent of production that remained lay on the borders with Chihuahua and Durango.[1]: 20 Cedillo cites an anonymous informer of the federal attorney general's office and judicial police, interviewed by a journalist, who said that growers who paid a "drug tax" marked their fields with coloured flags, so that the spraying helicopters covered them with water.[1]: 26
Cedillo writes that the task force destroyed drug and food crops alike, plundered stored harvests and burned the houses of poor peasants, so that thousands of highlanders left the sierra.[1]: 23 Many moved from Badiraguato, Guadalupe y Calvo and Tamazula to Culiacán and the United States. Badiraguato had 29,252 inhabitants in 1970 and 23,742 in 1980. One human rights activist estimated that up to 2,000 hamlets were abandoned.[1]: 25 The operation spread to Oaxaca and Guerrero in its first year,[1]: 14 and the defence ministry's final figures for the whole of it, from 1977 to 1987, count 224,252 illegal fields destroyed.[1]: 29
A report of 1985 to the United States House of Representatives said that 33 families controlled most of the growing areas in Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Sonora, Durango and Jalisco.[1]: 29 Cedillo argues that the operation moved the drug industry away from the north-west: leading traffickers of Sinaloa settled in Guadalajara, because of their close ties to the heads of the Federal Security Directorate.[1]: 31
Since 2000
In 2018 the army destroyed 774 hectares of marijuana in Sinaloa, 432 in Durango and 408 in Chihuahua. Together with Oaxaca, these states held almost 90 per cent of the marijuana it destroyed that year. In the first months of 2019 the three municipalities where the army destroyed the largest areas were Badiraguato, Tamazula and Guadalupe y Calvo; Guachochi was also among the ten.[5]
Valdivia wrote in 2019 that marijuana and poppy were the main source of income in the Sierra Tarahumara for the mestizos and for many Rarámuri, Ódami and Makurawe families. In parts of the region, trafficking groups led by mestizo men had taken much of the fertile land to grow the two crops and controlled the scarce water. They exploited Rarámuri people as cheap labour to sow and harvest marijuana.[3]
In May 2022 the army and air force found eight plantations, covering 11.5 hectares, near El Palmar in Tamazula, in the mountains on the border with Sinaloa. About 120 soldiers, most of them brought in by helicopter, cut and burned the crop.[6] In October 2024 the navy destroyed two plantations in the sierra of Badiraguato, near El Huejote and El Morirato. They covered 4,800 and 4,000 m² and held about 57,600 and 48,000 plants, some 31 tonnes in all.[7] In April 2025 state investigators in Chihuahua destroyed 1,800 plants on a plot of 600 m² at Carnerito, in the Dolores section of Guadalupe y Calvo. The plants stood about 1.30 m tall, three to the square metre. The report calls the municipality one of the parts of the state with the most illicit cultivation.[8]
InSight Crime reported in 2022 that the prices of cannabis and poppy had collapsed. Its reporters linked the fall to the legalisation of marijuana in states of the United States and to the switch of American consumers from heroin to fentanyl. The Sinaloa Cartel had turned to synthetic drugs, which need neither much land nor many farm workers. In the sierra of Sinaloa several farmers had given up cannabis and poppy. Some had moved to other crops, at times with the help of the government programme Sembrando Vida, and others had left farming. One farmer, whose family had grown both crops for generations, said that most plots in his community of about 1,000 people no longer grew either. Local farmers told the reporters that some members of the programme still grew cannabis and poppy to add to the support they received.[9]
Trade
InSight Crime reported in 2022 that a large share of the marijuana was by then sold in Mexico rather than exported. The crop of the sierra supplied a little over a dozen informal dispensaries in Culiacán and was also carried to Guadalajara and Mexico City. Farmers and growers told the reporters that networks linked to the Sinaloa Cartel still decided who could buy the marijuana and punished those who broke the rule.[9]
Growing Areas
No growing areas documented yet.
Accessions
No accessions documented yet.
Recent news
No news items are recorded for this growing region yet.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 Cedillo, Adela (May 2021). Operation Condor, the War on Drugs, and Counterinsurgency in the Golden Triangle (1977–1983) (PDF) (Report). Kellogg Institute for International Studies Working Paper. University of Notre Dame. Retrieved 14 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 González-Elizondo, M. Socorro; González-Elizondo, Martha; Tena-Flores, J. A.; Ruacho-González, Lizeth; López-Enríquez, I. Lorena (2012). "Vegetación de la Sierra Madre Occidental, México: una síntesis". Acta Botanica Mexicana (in español) (100): 351–403. doi:10.21829/abm100.2012.40.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Valdivia, Fátima (20 August 2019). "Auto-Determinación Indígena y Tráfico de Drogas en la Región Tarahumara, México". Portal (in español). University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee (June 1990). The NNICC Report 1989: The Supply of Illicit Drugs to the United States (PDF) (Report). pp. 65–67. Retrieved 14 October 2026 – via National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 MND Staff (26 August 2019). "Marijuana plantations destroyed by military down 70% in five years". Mexico News Daily. Retrieved 14 October 2026.
- ↑ "Ejército y fuerza aérea mexicana destruyen 11.5 hectáreas de mariguana Tamazula Durango". Luz Noticias (in español). 25 May 2022. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ Torres, Ernesto (7 October 2024). "Secretaría de Marina destruye más de 31 toneladas de plantas de mariguana en la sierra de Badiraguato". Luz Noticias (in español). Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ "AEI destruye plantío de marihuana en Guadalupe y Calvo: incineran 1,800 plantas". El Imparcial (in español). 25 April 2025. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Asmann, Parker; Dittmar, Victoria (6 December 2022). "En Sinaloa, el ocaso de la marihuana no hace mella al crimen organizado". InSight Crime (in español). Retrieved 19 October 2026.