U.S. authorities have expressed alarm at what they call an explosion of opium poppy in their southern neighbor. Echoing a federal drug agency assessment, President Trump has declared that \u201can astonishing 90 percent of the heroin in America comes from south of the border\u201d and cited that as one reason to\u00a0build a giant border wall<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yet Mexican and U.S. officials have struggled in recent years to answer some basic questions about Mexico\u2019s illegal poppy crop: How much is actually being grown? How much of it is the Mexican government destroying? And how much is being turned into heroin?<\/p>\n Now the Trump administration is intensifying its efforts to help Mexico get a more detailed picture of its poppy problem. It has begun to supply Mexican authorities with drones and geolocation technology and is funding studies to pinpoint how much poppy is being planted and how much heroin is produced from it.<\/p>\n The new initiatives emerged from several high-level meetings between Mexican and U.S. officials last year, as well as a trip in July by then-Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, who flew to see poppy fields in Guerrero state with Mexican military leaders, according to Mexican and U.S. officials.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s harsh rhetoric about Mexico on illegal immigration, trade and the wall could jeopardize that kind of security cooperation. On April 9, President Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto\u2019s office said he had instructed cabinet secretaries to review their bilateral programs with the United States, following a tense week in which Trump criticized Mexico about a\u00a0caravan<\/a>\u00a0of migrants heading toward the U.S. border.<\/p>\n But on certain issues, such as poppy, the two sides have already quietly made progress. With Trump as president, \u201cwe thought that there would have been a chilling of relations,\u201d said Juan Carlos Silva, chief of the anti-drug division of Mexico\u2019s federal police. \u201cOn the contrary, we have grown closer.\u201d<\/p>\n [U.S.-Mexico ties are strained, but that isn\u2019t stopping the U.S. from building a giant new embassy<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n The Drug Enforcement Administration said in a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0last year that Mexico supplies 93\u00a0percent of all heroin consumed in the United States, up from half of it in 2012 \u2014 even though it lags far behind Afghanistan and Burma as an opium poppy producer, according to\u00a0U.N. figures<\/a>.<\/p>\n The DEA also reported that production more than tripled in Mexico between 2013 and 2016, to 79,000 acres, in part because of \u201creduced poppy eradication.\u201d<\/p>\n But there is no consensus on those estimates, particularly the production numbers.<\/p>\n Mexican military officials deny that poppy production has tripled and say they have increased eradication efforts, deploying more than 20,000 soldiers on ground or aerial missions.<\/p>\n The troops destroyed about 71,000 acres last year and are on pace this year to surpass that, the officials said.<\/p>\n A decade ago, Mexico eradicated 27,000 acres, according to the United Nations.<\/p>\n There are several reasons for the disparate assessments.<\/p>\n Poppy, which is often cultivated in remote mountain areas, is harder to identify from aerial imagery than coca, the base ingredient of cocaine. In Colombia, once a major source of U.S. heroin, it is often grown in forests under cloud cover. In Mexico, where it is mainly grown in the western states of Guerrero, Sinaloa and Durango, it can also be interspersed with other crops, such as peach trees, making it difficult to detect.<\/p>\n And since poppy has such a short growing cycle \u2014 from seed to harvest in just four months \u2014 intermittent photography might miss certain fields, experts say.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are still a lot of question marks around the figures,\u201d said Martin Jelsma, director of the drug program at the Transnational Institute, a research organization based in Amsterdam, and the co-author of a forthcoming study on Mexican and Colombian poppy production.<\/p>\n Equally challenging, Jelsma said, is identifying the source country of a heroin sample. He doubts that the DEA can always tell whether heroin is made from Mexican or Colombian poppy, given that Mexican drug traffickers in some cases have hired Colombians to teach heroin-production techniques, so the product is similar.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a gross underestimate of the poppy cultivation in Colombia,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Lawrence Payne, a DEA spokesman, acknowledged that it was hard for the agency\u2019s scientists to distinguish between heroin varieties when Mexico first adopted Colombian recipes but said laboratory methods have been modified to address the problem.<\/p>\n DEA scientists can now determine a sample\u2019s variety and origin \u201cat the 95% confidence level,\u201d Payne wrote.<\/p>\n For the past year, U.S. officials have focused on trying to help Mexican authorities establish an accurate picture of how much poppy is being grown and a system for verifying the amount Mexican security forces have destroyed.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve not had that in the past,\u201d one U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a lack of authorization to comment publicly.<\/p>\n Until 2016, Mexico did not provide verifiable statistics on the size of its poppy crop. That year, working with the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, it produced its first such report, relying on aerial and satellite imagery that found that about 61,000 acres of poppy was being grown.<\/p>\n This summer, Mexico and the U.N. agency are expected to publish updated information and the first estimates of \u201cyield,\u201d or how much poppy paste and heroin result from the crop. The U.S. government has helped fund that study, known as MEXK-54.<\/p>\n In addition, U.S. authorities have given the Mexican military several drones to help identify fields, according to a senior Mexican military official. They have also provided handheld equipment that uses GPS coordinates to locate poppy fields that have been destroyed, then sends the data via satellite to the Mexican attorney general\u2019s office, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The Mexican army has the primary responsibility for eradication.<\/p>\n Mexican military officials describe these as test \u201cprojects\u201d that have not been formally adopted but say more information about the \u201cnew gadgets\u201d may be public soon.<\/p>\n Mexico has long been wary of allowing U.S. security agencies too much access. That has made it hard for the United States to evaluate the scope of poppy production or verify Mexican eradication efforts, said David W. Murray, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former chief scientist with the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the George W. Bush administration.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just been a very difficult thing to get full Mexican cooperation because of their concerns about their own sovereignty,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Military-to-military relations have improved in recent years, with Mexico taking a more active role in hemispheric defense forums. Even amid the tensions with the Trump administration, top Mexican military leaders have met regularly with their U.S. counterparts.<\/p>\n In July, during Kelly\u2019s visit to the Guerrero opium fields, he watched Mexican soldiers uproot and burn crops.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Mexican government eradicates a tremendous amount of opium,\u201d Kelly said in an interview at the time. \u201cIn fact, I believe something on the order of about 90\u00a0percent of the poppies that are under cultivation they eradicate. By contrast, I think, Afghanistan eradicates about 2\u00a0percent.<\/p>\n \u201cThe problem, of course, is there\u2019s five crops a year,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n [Inside the Mexican towns that produce America\u2019s heroin<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n After that visit, the two countries began developing new ways to work together on the issue, including boosting the use of technology.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a result of that trip and those conversations, these projects came about,\u201d a Mexican official said.<\/p>\n The DEA has added staff in Mexico to work on the opioid problem. U.S. law enforcement officials also said Mexican authorities appear to be stepping up efforts to combat it.<\/p>\n \u201cI have seen, definitely, an increase in poppy field seizures,\u201d one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid views.<\/p>\n Others, however, remain skeptical that Mexican authorities will do much more to curb opium poppy production.<\/p>\n \u201cNo matter how much money we pump into that, they\u2019re still going to do what they want to do,\u201d a second U.S. official said. \u201cThey might take all that equipment we throw at them and use it for something else.\u201d<\/p>\n Security experts in both countries question whether the Trump administration\u2019s drive against poppy will fare any better than previous attempts. Even though the U.S. government spent decades discouraging the flow of cocaine from Colombia, coca is again\u00a0being cultivated<\/a>\u00a0there at record levels.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s undeniable there\u2019s a stepped-up attempt to refocus efforts on this particular problem,\u201d said Eric Olson, a Latin American security expert at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. \u201cI just don\u2019t have a sense that there are any new ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n In Mexico, some analysts played down the Pe\u00f1a Nieto government\u2019s contributions to the anti-heroin fight during its five years in power, arguing that little effort has been made to develop programs for alternative crops or maintain security there as the cartels wage war,\u00a0driving violence<\/a>\u00a0to record levels last year.<\/p>\n Eradicating poppy, said Alejandro Hope, a security expert and former intelligence official, \u201chas not been a priority for this government.\u201d<\/p>\n Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.<\/p>\n \n![](\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/resizer\/eGfwaoGszY75MpUAEnwvKNUTjuw=\/480x0\/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/YSC2MHBMKAI6RBUI4BJ3UWHR4Q.jpg\")
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