Harper's: The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán

[Winehole23]

Michoacán, where around four in five of all avocados consumed in the United States are grown, is the most important avocado-producing region in the world, accounting for nearly a third of the global supply. This cultivation requires a huge quantity of land, much of it found beneath native pine forests, and an even more startling quantity of water. It is often said that it takes about twelve times as much water to grow an avocado as it does a tomato. Recently, competition for control of the avocado, and of the resources needed to produce it, has grown increasingly violent, often at the hands of cartels. A few years ago, in nearby Uruapan, nineteen people were found hanging from an overpass, piled beneath a pedestrian bridge, or dumped on the roadside in various states of undress and dismemberment—a particularly gory incident that some experts believe emerged from cartel clashes over the multibillion-dollar trade.

In Cherán, however, there was no such violence. Nor were there any avocados. Twelve years ago, the town’s residents prevented corrupt officials and a local cartel from illegally cutting down native forests to make way for the crop. A group of locals took loggers hostage while others incinerated their trucks. Soon, townspeople had kicked out the police and local government, canceled elections, and locked down the whole area. A revolutionary experiment was under way. Months later, Cherán reopened with an entirely new state apparatus in place. Political parties were banned, and a governing council had been elected; a reforestation campaign was undertaken to replenish the barren hills; a military force was chartered to protect the trees and the town’s water supply; some of the country’s most advanced water filtration and recycling programs were created. And the avocado was outlawed.

Citing the Mexican constitution, which guarantees indigenous communities the right to autonomy, Cherán petitioned the state for independence. In 2014, the courts recognized the municipality, and it now receives millions of dollars a year in state funding. Today, it is an independent zone where the purples and yellows of the Purépecha flag, representing the indigenous nation in the region, is as common as the Mexican standard. What started as a public safety initiative has become a radical oddity, a small arcadia governed by militant environmentalism in the heart of avocado country.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/forbidden-fruit-avocado-militias-michoacan-mexico/

[Winehole23]

By the late Sixties, only farms that produced more than five thousand pounds of the fruit per acre each year were profitable; just five growers in San Diego, the industry’s epicenter, depended on avocados for their entire income. Agribusiness began to look south of the border in the Seventies. The California Avocado Society, a collective founded by growers, deployed multiple research missions to Michoacán, where envoys made careful note of the region’s plentiful water. “In this area, water is free,” marveled their report from a trip in 1970. Local avocado growers’ only concern was “how to divert the water into channels on their property and to get the water to the trees.” At that point, imports of fresh avocados from Mexico to the United States were prohibited by federal regulation (established in 1914 to protect California farmers), but the large avocado firms began investing in the region anyway, with designs on selling the fruit elsewhere.


The North American Free Trade Agreement, when it went into effect in 1994, largely kept the ban in place, but crippling droughts and exorbitant land and water costs eventually pushed California’s industries into accepting a slow repeal of protections. Many small domestic growers were facing bankruptcy; the larger firms that weren’t had already invested in Mexico. After decades of malaise, the avocado became a surprise winner, and a cipher of the promise of free trade—“NAFTA’s shining star,” as one consultant later put it. Hill+Knowlton Strategies, the advertising firm best known for its role in goading the United States into the first Gulf War on behalf of the Kuwaiti government, helped rebrand the fruit. After achieving notoriety as one of the most spectacular commercial food failures of the twentieth century, the avocado finally entered the mainstream—as salad centerpiece, Mediterranean delicacy, and tropical delight. Guacamole and avocado toast became two of the most successful gustatory trends of the twenty-first century, pushed with prime-time Super Bowl ads. Michoacán’s avocado production went from around 800,000 metric tons in 2003 to more than 1.8 million metric tons in 2022. Over the same period, America’s avocado consumption quadrupled.


Today, groundwater in Michoacán is disappearing, and its bodies of water are drying up. Lake Zirahuén is polluted by agricultural runoff. Nearly 85 percent of the country was experiencing a drought in 2021, and experts project that the state’s Lake Cuitzeo, the second largest in all of Mexico, could disappear within a decade. In part because of the conversion from pine to avocado trees, the rainy season has shrunk from around six months to three. So profound is the drain on the region’s aquifers that small earthquakes have newly become commonplace. The one-hundred-mile avocado corridor has, in effect, become the only live theater of what is often referred to as “California’s water wars.”


It’s unclear whether the avocado can survive this changing climate. But in Michoacán, the more pressing question is whether its residents can survive the avocado.

[Blake]

I've seen a documentary on that situation. Never would have guessed there was such a thing as an avocado cartel.