<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Opium production in the Sierra de Nayarit perfectly illustrates the dialectic between accommodation and resistance, \u201cincorporation\u201d and autonomy. <\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Exploring how opium cultivation has\naffected the N\u00e1ayarite \u2013 as individuals, families, members of communities, and\nas a people \u2013 can therefore help us understand how radical \u2018modernisation\u2019\nefforts can end up supporting \u2018traditional\u2019 practices; how the presence \u2013\nrather than absence \u2013 of the state can contribute to rising violence and\ninsecurity; and how the distinct ethnic, political and economic identities of\nthousands of Indigenous people may be influenced in multiple contradictory ways\nthrough their participation in a multi-billion dollar, transnational and\ninherently extractive industry like the modern heroin trade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Corn and Costumbre<\/em> in the Sierra de Nayarit <\/h2>\n\n\n\nAlmost all of the 28,718 speakers of the N\u00e1ayari language registered in Mexico in 2015 live scattered across 5,000 square kilometres of Nayarit\u2019s mountains and canyons. Their homeland covers eighteen percent of the state\u2019s total area, and is its poorest and least densely populated region.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/Nayarit-CloseUp-with-Scale-724x1024.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThe N\u00e1ayarite have always survived by taking full advantage of the Sierra\u2019s diverse ecological niches: rivers and seasonal streams full of fish and crustaceans, on the banks of which they plant crops and fruit trees; scrublands spreading up the sides of canyons that provide fertile soil, edible wild plants, and pasture for livestock; pine forests full of firewood, material for building houses, game animals, edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms, and more pasture.2<\/a><\/sup> To get through the lean months of the dry season, the N\u00e1ayarite have traditionally depended on stores of squash, beans, and maize, grown during the rainy season on small plots called coamiles<\/em>. These are cleared using slash and burn techniques, tended mainly with machetes and coas<\/em> (digging sticks), and shifted every few years. <\/p>\n\n\n\nMaize is the most important of these crops, and has been since the time of the N\u00e1ayarite\u2019s ancestors; since the time of the first men, in fact, whom the gods made not from clay or dust, but from maize dough. To the N\u00e1ayari, maize is the sacred origin of all life, and alongside that grown for consumption, each N\u00e1ayari clan sows its own special, \u2018ancestral\u2019 variety of maize, handed down from generation to generation for exclusive use in ceremonies known as mitotes<\/em>. Celebrating these ensures, amongst other things, that the supernatural beings who control the universe will grant the participants health, protection, plentiful rains and a successful harvest. The ritual use of \u2018family\u2019 maize, and the initiation of children at mitotes<\/em> that coincide with the harvest, emphasise familial and communal kinship bonds and the parallels between the life-cycles of humans and maize.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\nDrugs, Development, and N\u00e1ayari Political Economy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
However, while the N\u00e1ayarite believe that \u2018maize is life,\u2019 few of them are\nable, today, to survive from its cultivation alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early twentieth century, government \u2018development\u2019 programmes\nbegan, in a slow and piecemeal fashion, to try to incorporate the Sierra into Mexican\n\u2018civilisation.\u2019 This project involved the building of\nschools; corporatist,\nstate-managed agrarian reform; violent anti-clerical crackdowns; and the local introduction\nof \u2018improved\u2019 agricultural techniques and small-scale industries such as\nlogging and tanning. However, these programmes worked mainly to the advantage\nof mestizo settlers recently arrived in the Sierra, who quickly established\nlinks with regional mestizo military and civil authorities in order to usurp previously\ncommunal lands for planting, ranching and logging. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
State policies that set out to transform\nnot only the Sierra\u2019s economy, but also dispersed N\u00e1ayari settlement patterns\nand even the very landscape itself, therefore disrupted subsistence strategies\nthat local people had developed over thousands of years in response to unique\nlocal conditions. By the middle of the twentieth century they had also\nincreased the awareness of Nayari leaders as to the monetary value of their\nlands and resources, which previously formed part of a landscape defined by\nritual, rather than its potential for profit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
N\u00e1ayari and mestizo caciques<\/em> (local bosses) alike gained much from state-promoted economic projects in the Sierra de Nayarit, and many grew rich from rearing cattle, selling off local lands and embezzling government subsidies (causing frequent and often violent conflicts in the process). In a case from 1972, a local mestizo cacique took control of a tractor that the federal government had donated to a N\u00e1ayari community and \u201cquickly ruined [it] by using it to run errands without changing the oil or filters.\u201d When challenged by the community\u2019s traditional authorities, his response was \u201cto drink heavily and run around the town yelling, \u2018the authorities have no right to judge crimes in this community.\u2019\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> A house built with modern materials as part of a later government \u201cdevelopment\u201d program in the same community was similarly \u201cappropriated by a man who had earlier been accused of systematically murdering his enemies in his position as the town\u2019s police chief.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\nMeanwhile the vast majority of the\nN\u00e1ayarite remained desperately poor, they became\nincreasingly dependent on access to cash in order to buy food from new, government-run\nshops (which made up for a logging-induced decline in wild food sources); to\ninvest in livestock; to finance religious celebrations; buy beer and tequila;\npurchase pick-up trucks and fuel; and partake of other fruits of global\n\u2018modernisation,\u2019 such as western medicine, mass-produced clothing, and\nbreeze-blocks and aluminium roofing. The only option for many of those who\nwanted to earn cash was to migrate to the Pacific coast, to work as temporary\nlabourers on commercial agricultural plantations during the dry season. There,\nentire families were housed together in cramped barracks with little in the way\nof ventilation or sanitation, working long hours outdoors in the tropical heat with\nfew breaks, and spending most of the little money they earned on the overpriced\nfood sold in the plantations\u2019 own tiendas de raya<\/em> (company stores). <\/p>\n\n\n\nOnce poppies were introduced to the N\u00e1ayarite in the 1980s, many saw in opium\na convenient way of supplementing their traditional subsistence activities without\nhaving to leave their homes for months at a time to face the harsh conditions\nand low wages of the coast. The teachers who provided them with seeds used\ntheir long-standing positions as state-sponsored brokers of local cultural and\npolitical change to encourage poppy cultivation, explaining that the opium\nharvested from these flowers was far more valuable than any of the other cash\ncrops \u2013 such as oats, alfalfa or peaches \u2013 with which some N\u00e1ayarite had\nexperimented in the past. \u201cThey all became good friends, and some started to\nsow little patches of poppy; before, the people here didn\u2019t know about poppies,\nnor even marihuana. And I think that these are have hurt us. Now the young\npeople, the kids, they don\u2019t want to earn a hundred pesos, they want a hundred thousand<\/em>\npesos!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn much the same manner as they cultivated maize, villagers sowed poppies in small plots carved from the local forests (which also hid them from prying eyes). They sold the opium back to the teachers, who then earned sizeable profits selling it on to regional drug-trafficking networks affiliated with Sinaloan capos<\/em>. The traffickers took charge of processing the opium into heroin; most N\u00e1ayarite remained peasants, rather than drug technicians, with little knowledge of the wider world of the drug trade.6<\/a><\/sup> One N\u00e1ayari acquaintance even explained that the bag of raw opium he showed me would eventually be turned into cocaine, so unconnected was he to the international heroin trade. Still, the rapid spread of this new, inherently commercial mode of agricultural production through the Sierra allowed local people to share in the profits of globalisation for the first time. \u201cSoon, the planes started arriving, so many planes! One pilot was a big tall guy with a cuerno de chivo<\/em> (AK-47) \u2013 back then no-one had seen one before, all they knew were .22 rifles, so they\u2019d gather round him and admire it. He\u2019d land the plane here, and get out a 24-pack of beers for all his friends here, and everyone would be drinking, all of us enjoying ourselves\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n“Now the youngsters are masters of the opium harvest”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Although for decades a numerous different state officials had protected\nand promoted opium production in the Sierra, in the early 1990s soldiers and\npolice officers were sent to destroy local poppy plantations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In order to protect themselves, their families and their crops, some N\u00e1ayarite\nattacked their persecutors with hunting rifles, shotguns, or even AK-47\nautomatic rifles, purchased from corrupt officials or drug traffickers. Numerous\nlocal men \u2013 and a few soldiers, too \u2013 were killed in the resultant clashes, and\nmany more were arrested and imprisoned. Some of those sent off to federal\nprisons in Tepic, Guadalajara or the Islas Mar\u00edas prison colony off the Nayarit\ncoast came into close contact with higher-level members of drug cartels. Some\nof these men \u2013 mainly mestizos from Nayarit, Sinaloa, Jalisco and even\nMichoac\u00e1n \u2013 later came to the Sierra to visit their N\u00e1ayari friends, helping\nsome of them to expand their poppy-growing operations or transform themselves\ninto local acaparadores<\/em> (literally \u201choarders\u201d), responsible for bulk-buying\nopium and selling it on to full-time traffickers. <\/p>\n\n\n\nDespite the increasing risks of imprisonment or even death that those involved in opium production faced, the signing of NAFTA in 1994 pushed ever more N\u00e1ayarite to depend on this illicit activity for their incomes. NAFTA cut into state subsidies for peasant agriculturalists and indigenous communities, flooded Mexican markets with cheap imports of US-grown maize, and undermined indigenous land-rights previously enshrined in the 1917 Constitution,7<\/a><\/sup> which together led to the disintegration of the regional and national agricultural economies across Mexico, and left opium one of the few cash crops that could still earn highland peasants any money at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sale of opium has enabled to resist the migratory pressures faced by indigenous peasants in much of the rest of rural Mexico, and to continue financing the ceremonies around which communal political and religious life revolves.<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Now the youngsters are masters of the opium harvest”, says the old man who first told me the story of how poppies arrived in the Sierra de Nayarit: \u2018The youth today are masters of harvesting opium.\u2019 In some communities, opium production has even become bound up with young people\u2019s ethnic identities: a case of \u2018I grow poppies, therefore I am N\u00e1ayari.\u2019 Moreover, the sale of opium has enabled them to resist the migratory pressures faced by indigenous peasants in much of the rest of rural Mexico, and to continue financing the ceremonies around which communal political and religious life revolves, helping many young N\u00e1ayari to withstand the acculturative forces emanating from mainstream Mexican society. At the same time, their indigeneity has provided them with defensive mechanisms in the context of the Mexican government\u2019s \u2018War on Drugs.\u2019 During various religious fiestas, participants mockingly dress up as soldiers, police officers, or notorious figures from the worlds of drug trafficking and politics, ritually referencing powerful external actors in ways that subvert their dominance and reaffirm the power of local identities and practices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
On a more practical level, N\u00e1ayari poppy farmers use portable radios to warn each other about the movements and activities of state forces, communicating only in the N\u00e1ayari language in order to render their messages incomprehensible to outsiders listening in. Other local people, particularly women, selectively claim ignorance of Spanish in order to avoid interrogation by soldiers or police officers.8<\/a><\/sup> It is an ironic twist of fate, then, that the interventions of neoliberal elites pursuing a \u201cwar on drugs\u201d alongside cultural, political and economic policies that constitute what is, in de facto <\/em>terms, a \u201cwar on Indigenous identity,\u201d have turned subsistence agriculturalists into much more \u201cprofessional\u201d drug producers, and transformed their indigeneity into a powerful defensive mechanism in the face of pervasive state violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Irrigated poppy cultivation has exacerbated inter-communal territorial conflicts, sometimes resulting in outbreaks of violence that echo the skirmishes of the revolutionary period. <\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, the constant risk of losses due to government forces, hail\nstorms, sudden frosts or plagues of insects, has encouraged many N\u00e1ayarite to try\nto increase their yields by investing in small-scale irrigation infrastructure\nand commercial fertilizers and pesticides. Due to the practicalities of setting\nup gravity-fed irrigation systems, their poppy fields are increasingly set up next\nto streams; and given that the streams located in the most remote parts of each\nN\u00e1ayari community often mark inter-communal boundaries, irrigated poppy\ncultivation has exacerbated inter-communal territorial conflicts, sometimes\nresulting in outbreaks of violence that echo the skirmishes of the\nrevolutionary period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The increasing use of fertilizers and pesticides has meanwhile eaten\ninto local profits. This forces many N\u00e1ayarite to spend ever more time supervising\ntheir poppy plots, obstructing their ability to simultaneously cultivate the\nmaize that is so central both to N\u00e1ayari ritual life and age-old subsistence strategies.\nAnd as merchants have tried to take advantage of the increasing monetization of\nthe local economy by importing ever larger quantities of commercially-produced\nalcohol into the Sierra, social problems related to excessive drinking \u2013 namely\nchronic alcoholism, domestic abuse, and drunken, often lethal violence between\nheavily-armed young men, some of whose families have been feuding with each\nother since the 1940s \u2013 has climbed exponentially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More recently, a precipitous drop in the price of opium in Mexico has forced\nthe reduction of opium production in the Sierra,\nand increased the number of N\u00e1ayarite leaving their homes in search of work in\nnearby cities or on the plantations of the Nayarit coast. Other locals, who as\nautonomous poppy cultivators had previously had little contact with drug\ncartels, have been directly contracted by the latter as labourers on poppy\nplantations in other parts of Mexico. Working for subsistence wages of 150 \u2013\n200 pesos per day, men, women and children, living in unsanitary conditions in\ntemporary camps close to the poppy fields, risk illness and violent abuse. Taken\nfar from their homeland, and integrated ever more tightly into the national\ndrug economy, these labourers are becoming increasingly disconnected from the\nritual practices upon which N\u00e1ayari social and political life in is founded, which\nmay in turn exacerbate local processes of social breakdown, and lead to a rise\nin interpersonal violence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Thus poppy cultivation has, on the one hand, helped\nmany N\u00e1ayarite to hold on to their coveted political, cultural and territorial\nautonomy; but on the other, has increased the violence and other social\nproblems affecting the Sierra de Nayarit, breaking apart families and even\nwhole communities. The sudden, dramatic drop in the price of opium across\nMexico has only exacerbated such problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What does the future hold? Perhaps the global\ncrisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted the\ncross-Pacific supply chains for synthetic heroin precursors, will lead to a new\nsurge in demand for natural opium, putting cash back into N\u00e1ayari pockets and helping\nto cushion them from ongoing physical, political and cultural threats. Or maybe\nthe N\u00e1ayari will go back to more traditional, subsistence-based lifestyles in\nthe absence of alternative sources of income. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only one thing is for sure: just as they have resisted the efforts of conquistadores<\/em>, missionaries, revolutionaries, soldiers and cartel gunmen to dominate them over the last 500 years, so too will the N\u00e1ayarite continue to fight for their right to control their homeland, their costumbre<\/em> and their ethnic and cultural identities, no matter the odds stacked against them.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNotes<\/h2>\n\n\n- CONAPO, Indices de marginacion 2010<\/a><\/em>, last accessed 14 August 2014 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
- George Otis, \u2018Clasificacion y aprovechamiento del paisaje entre los coras,\u2019 Flechadores de estrellas: Nuevas aportaciones a la etnolog\u00eda de coras y huicholes <\/em>(M\u00e9xico: lNAH-Universidad de Guadalajara, 2003), p.135-40 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
- Philip Coyle, From Flowers to Ash: N\u00e1yari History, Politics, and Violence<\/em> (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), pp.36-73 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
- Coyle, From Flowers to Ash<\/em>, p.202 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
- Coyle, From Flowers to Ash<\/em>, p.203 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
- For more information, see Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Nathaniel Morris, Benjamin Smith, \u2018The Last Harvest? From the US Fentanyl Boom to the Mexican Opium Crisis,\u2019 Journal of Illicit Economies and Development<\/em> (November 2019), Vol.1, No.3, pp.312\u2013329 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
- See James B. Greenberg, Anne Browning-Aiken, William Alexander, and Thomas Weaver (eds.), Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico<\/em> (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012) \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
- See Nathaniel Morris, \u2018Serrano Communities and Subaltern Negotiation Strategies: the Local Politics of Opium Production in Mexico, 1940 to the Present,\u2019 Social History of Drugs and Alcohol<\/em> (May 2020), Vol.43, No.1 \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Almost all of the 28,718 speakers of the N\u00e1ayari language registered in Mexico in 2015 live scattered across 5,000 square kilometres of Nayarit\u2019s mountains and canyons. Their homeland covers eighteen percent of the state\u2019s total area, and is its poorest and least densely populated region.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n The N\u00e1ayarite have always survived by taking full advantage of the Sierra\u2019s diverse ecological niches: rivers and seasonal streams full of fish and crustaceans, on the banks of which they plant crops and fruit trees; scrublands spreading up the sides of canyons that provide fertile soil, edible wild plants, and pasture for livestock; pine forests full of firewood, material for building houses, game animals, edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms, and more pasture.2<\/a><\/sup> To get through the lean months of the dry season, the N\u00e1ayarite have traditionally depended on stores of squash, beans, and maize, grown during the rainy season on small plots called coamiles<\/em>. These are cleared using slash and burn techniques, tended mainly with machetes and coas<\/em> (digging sticks), and shifted every few years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Maize is the most important of these crops, and has been since the time of the N\u00e1ayarite\u2019s ancestors; since the time of the first men, in fact, whom the gods made not from clay or dust, but from maize dough. To the N\u00e1ayari, maize is the sacred origin of all life, and alongside that grown for consumption, each N\u00e1ayari clan sows its own special, \u2018ancestral\u2019 variety of maize, handed down from generation to generation for exclusive use in ceremonies known as mitotes<\/em>. Celebrating these ensures, amongst other things, that the supernatural beings who control the universe will grant the participants health, protection, plentiful rains and a successful harvest. The ritual use of \u2018family\u2019 maize, and the initiation of children at mitotes<\/em> that coincide with the harvest, emphasise familial and communal kinship bonds and the parallels between the life-cycles of humans and maize.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n However, while the N\u00e1ayarite believe that \u2018maize is life,\u2019 few of them are\nable, today, to survive from its cultivation alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early twentieth century, government \u2018development\u2019 programmes\nbegan, in a slow and piecemeal fashion, to try to incorporate the Sierra into Mexican\n\u2018civilisation.\u2019 This project involved the building of\nschools; corporatist,\nstate-managed agrarian reform; violent anti-clerical crackdowns; and the local introduction\nof \u2018improved\u2019 agricultural techniques and small-scale industries such as\nlogging and tanning. However, these programmes worked mainly to the advantage\nof mestizo settlers recently arrived in the Sierra, who quickly established\nlinks with regional mestizo military and civil authorities in order to usurp previously\ncommunal lands for planting, ranching and logging. <\/p>\n\n\n\n State policies that set out to transform\nnot only the Sierra\u2019s economy, but also dispersed N\u00e1ayari settlement patterns\nand even the very landscape itself, therefore disrupted subsistence strategies\nthat local people had developed over thousands of years in response to unique\nlocal conditions. By the middle of the twentieth century they had also\nincreased the awareness of Nayari leaders as to the monetary value of their\nlands and resources, which previously formed part of a landscape defined by\nritual, rather than its potential for profit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n N\u00e1ayari and mestizo caciques<\/em> (local bosses) alike gained much from state-promoted economic projects in the Sierra de Nayarit, and many grew rich from rearing cattle, selling off local lands and embezzling government subsidies (causing frequent and often violent conflicts in the process). In a case from 1972, a local mestizo cacique took control of a tractor that the federal government had donated to a N\u00e1ayari community and \u201cquickly ruined [it] by using it to run errands without changing the oil or filters.\u201d When challenged by the community\u2019s traditional authorities, his response was \u201cto drink heavily and run around the town yelling, \u2018the authorities have no right to judge crimes in this community.\u2019\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> A house built with modern materials as part of a later government \u201cdevelopment\u201d program in the same community was similarly \u201cappropriated by a man who had earlier been accused of systematically murdering his enemies in his position as the town\u2019s police chief.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile the vast majority of the\nN\u00e1ayarite remained desperately poor, they became\nincreasingly dependent on access to cash in order to buy food from new, government-run\nshops (which made up for a logging-induced decline in wild food sources); to\ninvest in livestock; to finance religious celebrations; buy beer and tequila;\npurchase pick-up trucks and fuel; and partake of other fruits of global\n\u2018modernisation,\u2019 such as western medicine, mass-produced clothing, and\nbreeze-blocks and aluminium roofing. The only option for many of those who\nwanted to earn cash was to migrate to the Pacific coast, to work as temporary\nlabourers on commercial agricultural plantations during the dry season. There,\nentire families were housed together in cramped barracks with little in the way\nof ventilation or sanitation, working long hours outdoors in the tropical heat with\nfew breaks, and spending most of the little money they earned on the overpriced\nfood sold in the plantations\u2019 own tiendas de raya<\/em> (company stores). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Once poppies were introduced to the N\u00e1ayarite in the 1980s, many saw in opium\na convenient way of supplementing their traditional subsistence activities without\nhaving to leave their homes for months at a time to face the harsh conditions\nand low wages of the coast. The teachers who provided them with seeds used\ntheir long-standing positions as state-sponsored brokers of local cultural and\npolitical change to encourage poppy cultivation, explaining that the opium\nharvested from these flowers was far more valuable than any of the other cash\ncrops \u2013 such as oats, alfalfa or peaches \u2013 with which some N\u00e1ayarite had\nexperimented in the past. \u201cThey all became good friends, and some started to\nsow little patches of poppy; before, the people here didn\u2019t know about poppies,\nnor even marihuana. And I think that these are have hurt us. Now the young\npeople, the kids, they don\u2019t want to earn a hundred pesos, they want a hundred thousand<\/em>\npesos!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In much the same manner as they cultivated maize, villagers sowed poppies in small plots carved from the local forests (which also hid them from prying eyes). They sold the opium back to the teachers, who then earned sizeable profits selling it on to regional drug-trafficking networks affiliated with Sinaloan capos<\/em>. The traffickers took charge of processing the opium into heroin; most N\u00e1ayarite remained peasants, rather than drug technicians, with little knowledge of the wider world of the drug trade.6<\/a><\/sup> One N\u00e1ayari acquaintance even explained that the bag of raw opium he showed me would eventually be turned into cocaine, so unconnected was he to the international heroin trade. Still, the rapid spread of this new, inherently commercial mode of agricultural production through the Sierra allowed local people to share in the profits of globalisation for the first time. \u201cSoon, the planes started arriving, so many planes! One pilot was a big tall guy with a cuerno de chivo<\/em> (AK-47) \u2013 back then no-one had seen one before, all they knew were .22 rifles, so they\u2019d gather round him and admire it. He\u2019d land the plane here, and get out a 24-pack of beers for all his friends here, and everyone would be drinking, all of us enjoying ourselves\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although for decades a numerous different state officials had protected\nand promoted opium production in the Sierra, in the early 1990s soldiers and\npolice officers were sent to destroy local poppy plantations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to protect themselves, their families and their crops, some N\u00e1ayarite\nattacked their persecutors with hunting rifles, shotguns, or even AK-47\nautomatic rifles, purchased from corrupt officials or drug traffickers. Numerous\nlocal men \u2013 and a few soldiers, too \u2013 were killed in the resultant clashes, and\nmany more were arrested and imprisoned. Some of those sent off to federal\nprisons in Tepic, Guadalajara or the Islas Mar\u00edas prison colony off the Nayarit\ncoast came into close contact with higher-level members of drug cartels. Some\nof these men \u2013 mainly mestizos from Nayarit, Sinaloa, Jalisco and even\nMichoac\u00e1n \u2013 later came to the Sierra to visit their N\u00e1ayari friends, helping\nsome of them to expand their poppy-growing operations or transform themselves\ninto local acaparadores<\/em> (literally \u201choarders\u201d), responsible for bulk-buying\nopium and selling it on to full-time traffickers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the increasing risks of imprisonment or even death that those involved in opium production faced, the signing of NAFTA in 1994 pushed ever more N\u00e1ayarite to depend on this illicit activity for their incomes. NAFTA cut into state subsidies for peasant agriculturalists and indigenous communities, flooded Mexican markets with cheap imports of US-grown maize, and undermined indigenous land-rights previously enshrined in the 1917 Constitution,7<\/a><\/sup> which together led to the disintegration of the regional and national agricultural economies across Mexico, and left opium one of the few cash crops that could still earn highland peasants any money at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Now the youngsters are masters of the opium harvest”, says the old man who first told me the story of how poppies arrived in the Sierra de Nayarit: \u2018The youth today are masters of harvesting opium.\u2019 In some communities, opium production has even become bound up with young people\u2019s ethnic identities: a case of \u2018I grow poppies, therefore I am N\u00e1ayari.\u2019 Moreover, the sale of opium has enabled them to resist the migratory pressures faced by indigenous peasants in much of the rest of rural Mexico, and to continue financing the ceremonies around which communal political and religious life revolves, helping many young N\u00e1ayari to withstand the acculturative forces emanating from mainstream Mexican society. At the same time, their indigeneity has provided them with defensive mechanisms in the context of the Mexican government\u2019s \u2018War on Drugs.\u2019 During various religious fiestas, participants mockingly dress up as soldiers, police officers, or notorious figures from the worlds of drug trafficking and politics, ritually referencing powerful external actors in ways that subvert their dominance and reaffirm the power of local identities and practices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On a more practical level, N\u00e1ayari poppy farmers use portable radios to warn each other about the movements and activities of state forces, communicating only in the N\u00e1ayari language in order to render their messages incomprehensible to outsiders listening in. Other local people, particularly women, selectively claim ignorance of Spanish in order to avoid interrogation by soldiers or police officers.8<\/a><\/sup> It is an ironic twist of fate, then, that the interventions of neoliberal elites pursuing a \u201cwar on drugs\u201d alongside cultural, political and economic policies that constitute what is, in de facto <\/em>terms, a \u201cwar on Indigenous identity,\u201d have turned subsistence agriculturalists into much more \u201cprofessional\u201d drug producers, and transformed their indigeneity into a powerful defensive mechanism in the face of pervasive state violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, the constant risk of losses due to government forces, hail\nstorms, sudden frosts or plagues of insects, has encouraged many N\u00e1ayarite to try\nto increase their yields by investing in small-scale irrigation infrastructure\nand commercial fertilizers and pesticides. Due to the practicalities of setting\nup gravity-fed irrigation systems, their poppy fields are increasingly set up next\nto streams; and given that the streams located in the most remote parts of each\nN\u00e1ayari community often mark inter-communal boundaries, irrigated poppy\ncultivation has exacerbated inter-communal territorial conflicts, sometimes\nresulting in outbreaks of violence that echo the skirmishes of the\nrevolutionary period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The increasing use of fertilizers and pesticides has meanwhile eaten\ninto local profits. This forces many N\u00e1ayarite to spend ever more time supervising\ntheir poppy plots, obstructing their ability to simultaneously cultivate the\nmaize that is so central both to N\u00e1ayari ritual life and age-old subsistence strategies.\nAnd as merchants have tried to take advantage of the increasing monetization of\nthe local economy by importing ever larger quantities of commercially-produced\nalcohol into the Sierra, social problems related to excessive drinking \u2013 namely\nchronic alcoholism, domestic abuse, and drunken, often lethal violence between\nheavily-armed young men, some of whose families have been feuding with each\nother since the 1940s \u2013 has climbed exponentially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More recently, a precipitous drop in the price of opium in Mexico has forced\nthe reduction of opium production in the Sierra,\nand increased the number of N\u00e1ayarite leaving their homes in search of work in\nnearby cities or on the plantations of the Nayarit coast. Other locals, who as\nautonomous poppy cultivators had previously had little contact with drug\ncartels, have been directly contracted by the latter as labourers on poppy\nplantations in other parts of Mexico. Working for subsistence wages of 150 \u2013\n200 pesos per day, men, women and children, living in unsanitary conditions in\ntemporary camps close to the poppy fields, risk illness and violent abuse. Taken\nfar from their homeland, and integrated ever more tightly into the national\ndrug economy, these labourers are becoming increasingly disconnected from the\nritual practices upon which N\u00e1ayari social and political life in is founded, which\nmay in turn exacerbate local processes of social breakdown, and lead to a rise\nin interpersonal violence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus poppy cultivation has, on the one hand, helped\nmany N\u00e1ayarite to hold on to their coveted political, cultural and territorial\nautonomy; but on the other, has increased the violence and other social\nproblems affecting the Sierra de Nayarit, breaking apart families and even\nwhole communities. The sudden, dramatic drop in the price of opium across\nMexico has only exacerbated such problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What does the future hold? Perhaps the global\ncrisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted the\ncross-Pacific supply chains for synthetic heroin precursors, will lead to a new\nsurge in demand for natural opium, putting cash back into N\u00e1ayari pockets and helping\nto cushion them from ongoing physical, political and cultural threats. Or maybe\nthe N\u00e1ayari will go back to more traditional, subsistence-based lifestyles in\nthe absence of alternative sources of income. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Only one thing is for sure: just as they have resisted the efforts of conquistadores<\/em>, missionaries, revolutionaries, soldiers and cartel gunmen to dominate them over the last 500 years, so too will the N\u00e1ayarite continue to fight for their right to control their homeland, their costumbre<\/em> and their ethnic and cultural identities, no matter the odds stacked against them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nDrugs, Development, and N\u00e1ayari Political Economy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
“Now the youngsters are masters of the opium harvest”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The sale of opium has enabled to resist the migratory pressures faced by indigenous peasants in much of the rest of rural Mexico, and to continue financing the ceremonies around which communal political and religious life revolves.<\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Irrigated poppy cultivation has exacerbated inter-communal territorial conflicts, sometimes resulting in outbreaks of violence that echo the skirmishes of the revolutionary period. <\/mark><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n