The Flower of Time: Guerrero’s Red Mountain

From the Archives: World Press Photo contest 2022

A Mixtec elder on the Cerro de la Garza in Guerrero, Mexico, on 31 December 2021. Every year, on 31 December, Mixtecs climb the hill to perform rituals commemorating the end and beginning of a life cycle.

Mexico is the third-largest opium producer in the world, with half of the production being grown in its second-poorest state, Guerrero. The drug economy has transformed the social structure of the largely Indigenous farming communities which have turned to poppy cultivation as a means of survival. The photographer put scratches and pinpricks into prints of the photographs to represent trauma and the scratching of the poppy flower during opium extraction, while the color red represents drug violence and blood, but also life