Reuters
Thursday, February 4, 2010; 2:53 PM
URUAPAN, Mexico (Reuters) – This sunkissed corner of western Mexico is the source of an annual bounty of guacamole dip for U.S. Super Bowl fans, but extortion and kidnapping by drug gangs has cast a grim shadow over its avocado farmers.
The drug lords of Michoacan state have branched out in recent years from trafficking narcotics to menacing the prosperous avocado barons whose produce will be gobbled up by millions of Americans during Sunday’s football championship.
Michoacan’s avocado farmers can easily earn more than $150,000 a year, a huge sum in Mexico.
All the large growers and packers around the city of Uruapan have been threatened, people in the industry say, as well-armed cartels search for new sources of revenue amid pressure from a government crackdown.
Locked in a ruthless war with rival smugglers and security forces, Mexico’s drug gangs have slain some 18,000 people since late 2006. They are equally ruthless with business owners and farmers who are targeted for extortion money or ransom.
«In the last two or three years it has gotten worse,» a leader of the local avocado industry said, asking not to have his name printed. «It’s not something we like to talk about. It’s just something we live with.»
With demands for regular payments, the cartels suck cash out of an industry that has brought hundreds of millions of dollars to Michoacan over the last decade. Kidnap ransoms are often equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Many growers now stay clear of their prized land, managing their farms remotely, for fear of being approached or abducted. Some go to farms during the day with bodyguards but live with their families in towns a safe distance away.
«Many of them give money, others don’t,» one manager said, also declining to be quoted by name. «If you don’t give it, well, you are putting yourself in danger.»
In early November, avocado producer Martin Gallardo, 62, was snatched by three armed kidnappers. Although his family agreed to pay a ransom, he was found dead two weeks later.
Police arrested several men in connection with that murder and the kidnapping of three other businessmen, one of whom was chained to a tree and shot after his family had paid a ransom.
VIOLENT REGION
Michoacan is the turf of the La Familia drug cartel. Led by a brutal eccentric who has penned a ‘bible’ of macho dictums and who justifies murder and beheading with passages about the need to mete out justice to rivals, the syndicate has branched out from drug trafficking into other crimes.
Besides skimming profits from avocado growers, smugglers piggy-back on the trade to move their product and launder their illicit earnings, locals say.
Avocados are known as «green gold» in Michoacan because of the fortune they represent. But the drug gang threat has prompted some landowners to sell their plots and start new farms in the neighboring, and relatively tranquil, state of Jalisco.
Roughly 60 percent of the 80 million pounds of creamy avocado that will be eaten around Sunday’s game between the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts will be from Michoacan, according to the U.S.-based Hass avocado board.
Farmers grow the fat «Hass» avocados favored by Americans for their leathery purple skin and buttery flesh, and pickers criss-cross orchards from early January to collect the plump fruit and race it to grocery stores in time for the kickoff.
«We only pick the biggest ones this time of year,» said Leonel Penaloza as he swung from an avocado tree branch.
U.S. consumption of Michoacan avocados has leapt 50 fold since trade barriers with Mexico eased 15 years ago, and Californian growers who once kept a monopoly now embrace foreign growers whose presence boosts the market.
«The pie has gotten bigger and everyone can easily have a slice,» Jose Luis Obregon, director of the Hass avocado board, said, lamenting the growth that has made growers a target for drug gangs.
«If you are successful, you are a target,» he said.