War Against Marijuana Can Be Fatal for Pilots

The helicopters thundered over the craggy peaks of the western Sierra Madre, skimming over tall pines, waterfalls and fields of brilliant wildflowers.

It looks like paradise down there, but the pilots were looking for patches of a different shade of green.

It’s marijuana harvest time in the mountains of Michoacan, and the pilots trying to wipe out the fields with herbicides say theirs has become a very deadly war this year.

Growers, who supply as much as three-fourths of the marijuana consumed in the United States, are arming with automatic weapons and even bazookas, the pilots say.

“We always have to be ready for anything: cables stretched over fields of marijuana, snipers waiting in ambush. You just never know what danger is lurking around the next mountain ridge or canyon,” said one commander, Samuel Herrera. “We are in a war here.”

The Mexican attorney general’s office has sent more than 100 helicopters and spotter planes to spray thousands of small marijuana plots that dot Mexico’s mountainous Pacific coast.

It used to be that the growers harvested by night and retreated into remote canyons and caves before daybreak and the arrival of the helicopters.

But the pilots say they are encountering more armed growers than ever in broad daylight.

Four fatal helicopter accidents have occurred this year, said officials of the Mexican attorney general’s office, who took a reporter on a helicopter raid last Tuesday on a plantation near Tacambaro, a town 160 miles west of Mexico City.

While Herrera said it’s been a bad year, he refused to say exactly how many pilots or drug agents have been killed or just how effective the traps laid by growers have been.

Pilots are bolting 5-foot-long serrated blades to the noses of the helicopters to cut aerial tripwires, wearing bulletproof vests and taking along a second helicopter with armed agents as backup.

“I went through four steel cables just on one plot in a canyon,” said pilot Enrique Barragan. “You just grind away and hope that wire snaps. Another time they sprayed my helicopter with 11 bullets but I got out OK.”

At a makeshift base outside Uruapan, federal police agents bristling with automatic weapons guarded a dirt airstrip where 10 helicopters prepared for flight. Two had patched bullet holes.

Crews loaded 120-gallon containers beneath the choppers with Uproquat, a herbicide that can wither marijuana plants within 72 hours.

Weighed down by his bulletproof vest, pilot David Ortiz tensed at the throttle recently as he steered a Bell 14-seater helicopter over row upon row of jagged mountains.

Federal judicial police in jeans and cowboy boots sat in Ortiz’s helicopter and in two others, ready to pounce.

But there were no traps and no shooting as the helicopters zoomed down over the ridge, circled twice and landed beside 6-foot-high plants of a potent Colombian variety of marijuana.

Nearby, a drying shed made of corrugated roofing and pine logs was hung with marijuana stalks. A campfire still smoked, a can of Nestle decaffeinated coffee lay open nearby, and there were enough cans of tuna to last weeks.

Roberto Hernandez Cano, a federal police officer, said three such plantations could be raided in a day, adding to the 18,900 acres of marijuana destroyed in the first eight months of the year.

He said the pilots spray what they can but conceded that many more plots go undetected.

The plantation had been spotted a day earlier, and army troops had managed to get in on a logging road. Some 25 soldiers uprooted the plants and piled them on bonfires 10 feet high, lighting them with kerosene.

As a thick pall of yellowish smoke settled across the hillside, a helicopter spraying Uproquat made repeated passes over a second field of marijuana, the herbicide falling like blue rain.

“As you can see, this soil is very soft--and also very rich in minerals left by the volcanoes. It’s perfect for growing marijuana,” said Hernandez, crumbling some in his fingers.

He called it a very lucrative crop, both for rich landowners and the poor campesinos.

He said one acre could yield 680 pounds of dried and clean marijuana, selling for at least $30 a pound wholesale as opposed to 50 cents a pound for corn. On the street, the weed sells for dozens of times that price.