In this small Mexican town, avocados were a lifeline

- Click here to listen to this article - Share via See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred - In a mountain hamlet, avocado farming lifted once-poor families into the middle class, but opened the door to cartel extortion, kidnapping and fear. SAN ÁNGEL ZURUMUCAPIO, Mexico — Óscar García slowed his truck as he passed the checkpoint of paramilitaries who now guard his town, calling out the nicknames of several of the masked men toting semiautomatic rifles. They waved him through. His grandfather, Francisco, 74, who rode beside him in a straw cowboy hat, shook his head. This region had once been peaceful, if poor. “The avocados changed everything,” he said. The explosive growth of the avocado industry has brought enormous wealth to this stretch of western Mexico. “But it also brought terror,” Francisco said. Danger lurked in the shady groves of avocado trees that stretched on the mountainsides as far as the eye could see. It had touched their town, and their family. Óscar turned off the winding highway and up a rutted dirt road lined with orchards. He is only 18, but it is his job now to care for his family’s farm. After a few miles, he put his foot on the brake. “This,” he said quietly, “is where they found my father’s truck.” 1. The main plaza of San Ángel Zurumucapio, surrounded by avocado orchards that have brought prosperity to the town. 2. Francisco García at the family home in San Ángel Zurumucapio, in Mexico’s Michoacan state. 3. An “autodefensa,” or armed member of the town’s militia, checks a vehicle’s paperwork at one of the barricades erected to protect San Ángel Zurumucapio,. San Ángel Zurumucapio, a hamlet of 6,000 with P’urhépecha indigenous roots, is the kind of place where everybody seems to be distant relatives, and where the social calendar revolves around the big rodeos held every few months. Not long ago, this region had all been virgin forest. As a young man, Francisco traversed it on horseback, eking out a living by draining resin from the towering pines. Back then, it felt as though the only way a person could get ahead was by leaving. That’s what Francisco had done, toiling in Texas for a stint to afford a house back home large enough for his 12 children. His oldest son, known as Pancho, had done the same, heading north as a teenager to work six years on a Christmas tree farm in North Carolina. When Pancho returned to Mexico to build a life with his wife, Terésa Pérez, the first thing he did was clear a patch of forest and plant avocados. Among the many changes wrought by the North American Free Trade Agreement was the termination, in 1997, of the U.S. ban on the importation of Mexican avocados. It’s not just drugs. Mexico’s cartels are fighting over avocados. Over the next three decades, soaring demand for the fruit transformed Michoacán state into the center of global avocado production — and catapulted a generation of people like Pancho from poverty into the middle class. Pancho and Terésa built a home, bought new cars and took beach vacations. They dressed their three kids, Ana, Óscar and José, in good clothes and sent them to good schools. Anyone with a little capital planted avocados and did the same. The seeding of hundreds of thousands of acres of avocado trees transformed the state’s climate, with deforestation coming as climate change brings higher temperatures and less rain. And it drew criminal opportunists eager to diversify beyond the drug trade. 1. Reynano López 46, an avocado farmer, starts his morning shift with the self-defense militia. 2. Community police officers and “autodefensas” stand guard at the main barricade of San Ángel Zurumucapio, monitoring people leaving or entering the community. By the mid-aughts, armed criminals in Michoacán expanded from trafficking meth, heroin and cocaine into the avocado trade, seizing control of farms, clearing forests to plant orchards and threatening violence against growers who refused to pay exorbitant “protection” fees. In San Ángel, those men swaggered around town, smoking marijuana and blasting banda music from their flashy trucks. Óscar grew up fearing them. He ducked a shootout in front of the neighborhood altar to the Virgin Mary that his grandpa had helped build, and took cover while gangs exchanged bullets near his school. The fathers of classmates had vanished — farmers held captive until their family could pay ransom. Óscar worried about his dad, whose trees grew on a remote stretch several miles outside of town. Pancho often took him there, teaching Óscar when to fertilize and how to identify deadly fungus. Pancho seemed unafraid. He kept to himself, spending most nights in front of the television with his family. He refused to buy a weapon for self-protection even as his brothers and many friends armed themselves. “Who would I have to defend myself against?” he asked. But across San Ángel, anger was palpable, with many complaining about the government’s inaction. Most crimes across Mexico went unsolved, and authorities sometimes appeared to be colluding with criminals instead of fighting them. In 2021,residents voted to adopt a model of self-governance, an option available to Indigenous communities in the state. Traditional political parties were banned, and a council of locals began directly managing the town’s funds. Not long after, after townsfolk thwarted an attempted kidnapping of a local grower, hundreds of people gathered in the sun-bleached central plaza and drafted a communique. “We are taking up arms due to the insecurity we face day to day: the extortion, threats, assassinations and kidnappings,” it read, adding a P’urhépecha phrase — Juchari uinapekua — that translates to “strength in unity.” Soon, local men were standing guard in shifts at the two entrances into town, aiming their weapons at trucks laden with freshly picked avocados and cars packed with farmhands as they demanded identity documents. They constructed elaborate barricades with concrete, sandbags and razor wire. Pancho opposed the fortification of the town, although most of his siblings supported it. He grudgingly showed up for his twice-monthly guard shifts. His father, Francisco, was also wary, afraid that the town’s militarization would somehow provoke further conflict. Francisco worried about the proliferation of high-caliber guns, which few locals knew how to handle safely. One member of the self-defense militia had accidentally shot himself in the foot. Besides, though the presence of armed vigilantes helped many in town feel safer, the fact remained that much of Michoacán was still lawless. Locals still had to do shopping in the nearby city of Uruapan, where Mayor Carlos Manzo was gunned down by a cartel operative last year, and work on their farms in the mountains. A crusading Mexican mayor who battled cartels like a vigilante hero was assassinated, thrusting his widow into the fight he died leading. On Dec. 10, 2024, Pancho drove to his orchard in his white GMC truck. An assistant rode shotgun. Terésa thought it was odd when her husband didn’t return home for lunch. She grew alarmed when he missed dinner. There was no cellphone signal in Pancho’s orchard, so Óscar and one of his uncles drove there to look. They found Pancho’s truck, abandoned. He and his assistant were gone. Pancho’s brother called up the leaders of the self-defense milita, and soon 200 men were combing the hills by flashlight. That night some of them stormed a major highway, closing lanes of traffic to demand a response from state authorities. National Guard trucks rolled into town the next day to take up the search. Officials found few clues except a farmer on a neighboring ranch who said that he had seen two young men carrying long guns in the groves the day Pancho disappeared. The state investigation stalled. Pancho’s brothers pursued their own leads, at one point visiting a local leader of organized crime. But the man said his group did not have Pancho. The family believes he was likely the victim of a kidnapping gone wrong, and worries that the attention they called to the case — mobilizing the militia and blocking the highway — may have scared off ransomers. Eventually, Francisco ordered his family to stop looking for Pancho. He feared that he might lose another son — or a grandchild — in the process. He now worries about Óscar, who looks just like Pancho, with his thin build and oval face. He recently dropped out of high school to tend to the farm full time. He seemed happiest when he was on his twice-monthly shifts with the militia, holding a weapon. “He’s not the same,” Francisco said of his grandson. “I’m not the same.” He refuses to admit that Pancho is probably dead. He and his wife keep a candle lit in front of a photograph of their son in their kitchen, where they prepare elaborate meals, always with handmade corn tortillas and generous servings of avocado. For Francisco, avocados had given opportunity. His family’s comfortable compound, the new trucks, the prize-winning rodeo bull he pampers in a pen behind his house. But they also brought violence. And now a grandson will grow up without a father.