Green Gold for Gringos

You don’t need to be an abogado to realize the value of an avocado. It used to be that you had to live in California or the Southwest to access these luscious fruits-masquerading-as-vegetables, and mostly you found them at Mexican restaurants in the form of guacamole. They were seasonal and grown mostly in the warmer US climates where they were consumed. Time passed. Today, those yummy green fruit-veggies are everywhere. Demand exploded. Boston loves them. Seattle and Buffalo as well. They are in so many dishes, from sushi rolls and avocado toast to foodie-driven salads. Not so seasonal anymore either. OK, Peter, so why have they elevated their presence into a socio-economic-political blog? Tariffs wars? If only…

Mexico can produce them year-round. And that’s the catch. It’s one of those stories that slides under the tsunami of news about impeachment efforts, Brexit and the indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu. “[The Mexican state of] Michoacan, whose plentiful rain, sunshine and rich volcanic soil make it an ideal place to grow the fruit, was uniquely positioned to capitalize on its rising popularity. It is the only state in the country allowed to sell to the U.S., which banned avocados from Mexico until 1997 over concerns about pests.

“As exports of Michoacan avocados boomed — on their way to $2.4 billion last year — luxury housing developments and car dealerships sprang up in Uruapan and elsewhere as huge swaths of forest were cleared to grow more.” Kate Linthicum writing for the Los Angeles Times, November 22^nd. That’s the story most of us know, if we know anything about the cultivation of Mexican avocados at all. And Americans do love their avocados.

But Mexican farmers are being shot, driven off their land. Precious forests are illegally being razed. It’s also one of those side-bars, a product of too many guns, particularly military-grade assault rifles, purchased “legally” at US gun shows or from the thousands of US gun stores and smuggled into Mexico, fueling a civil war of corrupting, ultra-violent cartels against an ill-equipped government trying to contain a contagion that makes life for too many Mexicans living hell.

We all know about the cultivation, processing, shipment and transshipment of hard and soft narcotics from and through Mexico, particularly driven by exceptionally high and unchecked demand from the United States. But drug smuggling is dangerous work, and as an increasing number of states decriminalize or even legalize some once illicit drugs, cartels needed to find new products to generate cashflow. Illegally harvested timber was an easy side-business, but it was an excuse for something bigger. Diversification. 

“The cartel members showed up in this verdant stretch of western Mexico [Michoacan] armed with automatic weapons and chainsaws… Soon they were cutting timber day and night, the crash of falling trees echoing throughout the virgin forest. When locals protested, explaining that the area was protected from logging, they were held at gunpoint and ordered to keep quiet… Stealing wood was just a prelude to a more ambitious plan.

“The newcomers, members of a criminal group called the Viagras, were almost certainly clearing the forest to set up a grow operation. They wouldn’t be planting marijuana or other crops long favored by Mexican cartels, but something potentially even more profitable: avocados.

“Mexico’s multibillion-dollar avocado industry, headquartered in Michoacan state, has become a prime target for cartels, which have been seizing farms and clearing protected woodlands to plant their own groves of what locals call ‘green gold.’

“More than a dozen criminal groups are battling for control of the avocado trade in and around the city of Uruapan, preying on wealthy orchard owners, the laborers who pick the fruit and the drivers who truck it north to the United States… ‘The threat is constant and from all sides,’ said Jose Maria Ayala Montero, who works for a trade association that formed its own vigilante army to protect growers.

“After seizing control of the forest in March, the Viagras announced a tax on residents who owned avocado trees, charging $250 a hectare in ‘protection fees.’… But they had competition. Rivals from the Jalisco New Generation cartel wanted to control the same stretch of land — and residents were about to get caught in the middle of a vicious fight… In May, a convoy of pickup trucks loaded with Jalisco fighters raced into the woods and an hourlong gun battle broke out…

“‘They’ll come to your house and shoot up your whole family,’ [said one farmer] ‘Kids included.’... Last year, 1,338 people were killed in Michoacan, more than any year on record. This year has been even deadlier, with 1,309 homicides through October, putting the death toll on track to top 1,500.” LA Times.

Why now? Why avocados? Strangely, this nasty trend is an offshoot of US policy. “Mexican forces, with strong U.S. support, focused on capturing or killing cartel leaders. But that strategy backfired as the big cartels fractured into smaller and nimbler organizations that sought criminal opportunity wherever they could find it.

“‘For many of those smaller groups, it’s far easier to just prey on local populations,’ said Falko Ernst, a Mexico-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, which promotes nonviolent solutions to conflicts. ‘It’s a myth that it’s only about drugs.’

“In Michoacan, where there have been dozens of cartel splits over the last dozen years, organized crime’s invasion of the avocado industry is a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere in the country — and a potent illustration of how the government has unintentionally fueled more violence.” LA Times. 

It is a full-blown civil war, enabled by inane American gun policies and our big brother demands of Mexico, even as the United States has been completely impotent in stemming the US demand for illicit narcotics. Bad enough when this ultra-violence focused on drugs, but when the explosion of gangs seeps into everyday life and very legitimate livelihoods – from the gangster equivalence of “eminent domain” to their old-world protection rackets – the nature and scope of the social harm across the entire spectrum of Mexican existence becomes devastatingly obvious. Mexico is edging towards “failed state” status along our border that a 17^th century solution – a physical wall – will not even begin to contain.

When trucks carrying avocados cross US inspection stations at the border, the inspectors are looking at… er… avocados. Now what? “Eduardo Moncada, a political scientist at Barnard College who is writing a book in part about extortion in Michoacan, said the avocado trade’s relationship with organized crime varies dramatically across the region, which makes it difficult for authorities and citizens to navigate… ‘When you don’t know who controls what, it becomes much harder to live your daily life,’ he said.

“Many here had high hopes for President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office a year ago and declared that Mexico was no longer at war with cartels. But besides vowing to fight poverty and shift security duties from the military to a newly created civilian National Guard, he has yet to articulate a new plan to curb violence.

“‘There is an abject absence of law enforcement strategy,’ said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ‘If you’re going to say what does not work, you have to say what will work.’” LA Times. Corruption remains one of the biggest problems on earth, fueling income inequality, preserving endemic poverty, stemming true economic growth, fomenting violence and injustice… and we have become one of the greatest enablers of this malignancy on earth. Even within our own nation, corruption has been legitimized at the very top of our power structure. Our message to the rest of the world has changed.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and I remember when I thought that sex made the world go round, but apparently, I was so wrong; it’s corruption.