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Mexico’s anti-avocado militias
- ttymck 2y ago> We finally managed to recall the first name of our point person on the council How do you not have at least a hand scrawled itinerary ready to prompt you? > Uli joked about our holdup at the checkpoint, but Marcos didn’t laugh Why were they so unaware of the severity of the situation? Is it uncharitable to say their behavior makes me question the caliber of their journalism?
- neilv 2y agoIf they're writing first for a UK audience, how they described the incident could be cultural. I can totally imagine some UK people I know writing or speaking about an incident that way. It doesn't mean they're less aware or capable than someone who would write of the same incident differently.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoI'm sorry but it objectively reads as incompetence. There's no other way to read it.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agodanger signals, or what constitutes a dangerous situation, changes from country to country. so if you hop on a jet, drive to some area out and about, it would be easy to be somewhere you are in danger and not realize it. i had a co-worker from another country talk about going somewhere in an american city, and we were all like 'dude you could have died', he shrugged, said it didn't seem bad.
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- amanaplanacanal 2y agoLooks like the article was reprinted from Harper’s, which is an American magazine.
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- irrational 2y ago> They squinted at the business card in a plastic sleeve that I was passing off as a press credential If you are passing off a business card as fake press credentials, you aren’t a real journalist.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoI’m not sure what other credentials an American journalist would have. Freedom of the press means everyone can be a journalist.
- lupusreal 2y agoFor some reason a lot of people think you can't be a journalist unless a corporation has blessed you. It's strange.
- BrandonMarc 2y agoThe corporate press went out of their way to solidify this notion. Because of course.
- stonogo 2y agoI think it is uncharitable. Depending on who you're dealing with, trying to hide any checkpoint problems might come across as a red flag. Joking about it is a way to show that you're honest while indicating you don't think there's a serious problem now. It's up to the listener to agree or not, but at least you reported the incident.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoAvocados have high demand, high price and expire fast. They require high amounts of water to grow.
- anthk 2y agoAnd yet some idiots want to grow these in Spain in the 2nd worst place of the country to plant these beside of the Almeria and Aragonese deserts. And, yes, I know Spain it's highly irregular and due to the orography you can have literal deserts and green, Britain-like mountains and later Montana/Idaho like flat farmfields over very few hours by car kinda like USA.zip, but that's not the point.
- Dma54rhs 2y agoCould do it in Galicia? Maybe not enough sunshine but water is not a problem.
- anthk 2y agoHigh humidity and the climate it's UK like. If avocado can grow up in Wales/Ireland, it might work under Galicia. Still, it's prone to speculation and it needs tons of water, something the Eastern of the country is not short of.
- xenospn 2y agoIsrael exports tons of avocado. Spain has very similar landscape and climate, no reason why they couldn’t do it.
- SapporoChris 2y agoThe ecological and political consequences of avocados appears harsh. The article touches on both of these points. But I have no idea how global consumption could be reduced without also causing harm.
- hulitu 2y ago> But I have no idea how global consumption could be reduced without also causing harm. One can start by implementing democracy. And no, i don't mean plutocracy, lobbyism or other forms of cortuption.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoWhat about all the foods that require more water / inputs than avocados?
- eth0up 2y agoIt's a notion of mixed sentiment that in some strange land, one could be slapped for daring avocado toast. Maybe the water is an excuse.
- pantalaimon 2y agoMeat production is still significantly more resource intense, we are cutting down the rainforest to make more room for feed crops.
- otabdeveloper4 2y agoYou don't need feed crops for meat. Historically people used marginal land where crops don't grow to graze animals. (And there is a lot of marginal land, even with modern fertilizers.) Anything else makes no economic sense.
- deepvibrations 2y agoReality is that more than 99 percent of US meat production facilities are factory farms.
- anigbrowl 2y agoIn Cherán, however, there was no such violence. Nor were there any avocados. Thirteen 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, cancelled 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 programmes were created. And the avocado was outlawed. Direct action gets the goods.
- skrebbel 2y agoWow that’s some serious A-Team level story
- alephnerd 2y agoYea, and then those kinds of organizations become corrupted themselves because money and power are extremely alluring. Look at the Autodefensas in Colombia and Michoacán, or the origins of the Taliban in Kandahar's opium belt (Maiwand) in the early 1990s. Militas are not hallmarks of direct democracy - they are hallmarks of societal and political collapse.
- moralestapia 2y agoI'd an already corrupt environment for any other "maybe corrupt in 10 years" any day.
- moralestapia 2y agoI'd change* ...
- orwin 2y ago
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoAfter reading, it appears the humble avocado might be better farmed vertically, using hydroponics, in region(s) with sufficient access to fresh water, and somewhere with the rule of law. It appears to be as much of a "resource curse" as the drug trade is/was to Michoacán.
- rob74 2y agoThe problem is just that avocados farmed without regulatory oversight on illegally deforested (or otherwise occupied) land in regions with insufficient rule of law will be cheaper - same as with palm oil, marijuana (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-11/illegal-marijuana-grows-have-overrun-the-california-desert https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-11/illegal-...) and several other products...
- h0l0cube 2y agoPeople would pay extra for ‘conflict-free’ avocados I bet
- makeitdouble 2y agoWe have a similar conundrum for coffee, and the "this coffee is ethically good" handling is just complicated. It works at super small scale, for extra invested people. The bigger the scale becomes, the murkier it is, and at some point a vendor is just selling a label with not much reality behind it.
- h0l0cube 2y agoAre you talking ‘ethical fair trade’? Because there’s definitely reputable and properly audited designations in this space (edit: namely the green and blue Fairtrade International and Rainforest Alliance, all the imitation marks are junk)
- makeitdouble 2y ago
- DoItToMe81 2y agoWhile what is described here is a legitimate political movement, it's important to remember most 'militias' in these contexts are very often funded by, part of, or become rival criminal groups. I remember watching Vice lionize rival Cartel thugs as "fed up anti-Cartel paramilitaries". I had to laugh.
- nathan_compton 2y agoIts interesting that if you are sitting on top of something valuable its great, as long as its not too valuable. At a certain point people are willing to kill and cheat for something really valuable, and then if you are sitting on top of it, you're fucked.
- amelius 2y agoSomething is missing in your theory. Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, etc. are sitting on something really valuable.
- mycologos 2y agoThe thing that's missing is living under a functional government.
- nathan_compton 2y agoIt isn't really that exploitable, though. You couldn't march up to any of these people and take it and have it keep its value. It's not like Musk has a 4 billion dollar diamond in his stomach.
- selimthegrim 2y agoNow I’m envisioning Musk like the Christmas goose in The Blue Carbuncle
- selimthegrim 2y ago*Adventure of the…
- makeitdouble 2y agoThis is the resource curse in a very reduced and local setting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
- anthk 2y agoAs a Spaniard, I know México used to do it fine 50, 60, 100 years ago. Ditto with Argentina, albeit the level of violence and social issues are nowhere close to México. What happened?
- deepsun 2y agoPeople didn't care much about politics (and distant future in general), and voted in populists, who basically destroyed the economy.
- prmoustache 2y agoI also live in Spain, but my partner is Mexican and I know a number of argentines including one who just spent months travelling in latin america. She travelled mostly alone, spent many nights sleeping in a van on her own in Mexico and said she felt much safer than in the Buenos Aires area where she used to live before moving to Spain. And Buenos Aires is considered a safe city. Last time I was in Mexico I never felt in danger[1] despite travelling in some hot areas. I was however told to only drive during daytime and using the main highways. I eructed at the face of a taxi driver who was cut me off while I was crossing a street in Yucatan, I wouldn't have done that in Guanajuato where I would have feared any driver could have pulled a gun. The only conclusion I can do is that - they are both very big countries full of contrasts - there are objective statistical numbers - but the perception of security/violence is very subjective - these numbers can vary greatly over a specific time frame. - the numbers can vary greatly geographically: Chiapas is not Michoacan or Sonora, Cancún is not Mexico City or Buenos Aires. And within big cities there can be a lot of contrasts between neighborhoods, sometimes even inside a single one. [1] well I did felt in danger, but because of the general state of traffic. Huge trucks driven recklessly by drivers under influcence were my main concerns.
- downut 2y agoI'm a gringo and have driven all over NW Mexico: BCS/BCN and Sonora. So cities: Guaymas, Nogales, Puerto Peñasco, Mexicali, Tijuana, Ensenada, La Paz, Cabo, etc. With my wife and occasional daughter, we've city-hiked extensively CDMX, Querétaro, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and by design not the wealthiest areas. Also by design we are happiest when we're the only gringos around, for instance in a restaurant. We all stick out prominently. I hiked across lower middle class Guadalajara and rode the new subway back to the centro and I had nothing but positive interactions the whole way. In summary every one of these trips has been a positive experience with nary a rotten situation, although one has to be careful on the further reaches of the Metro de la Ciudad de México. Even then, behavior matters, and I've extricated us from a possibly escalatory situation by just acting like a native, no problemo. Even done the early Sunday traffic ticket (in Guaymas) with a few hours cooling our heels at (not in) the police station before la mordita set us free. We were finally brought before el jefe, and had to listen to an impenetrable Sonoran dialect harangue (I couldn't pick out the numbers!). When he paused for a while, I respectfully fanned $150US or so of pesos in front of him, he picks the fine. About $80US. Not rotten though. Rotten is when you find yourself adjacent to near future health issues. I read various Mexico news sites in Spanish and the facts are if you are a low status Mexicano not living close to a city center it seems occasionally quite gruesome. In the US our family has explored the deepest wildernesses by ourselves all over the country, and never had a problem[1]. In México I wouldn't dare do such a thing. I also wouldn't travel at night outside of the nice areas of city centers. If you want to learn more about what it's like for the low status Mexicanos working extraordinarly hard to make a living in the rural areas of Mexico, I highly recommend the recent (poorly edited and overly verbose) book "Searching For Modern Mexico". He has a section focusing on the avocado industry situation, which is just awful. My heart goes out to those people. We're all converging in Tijuana soon to spend a while in Ensenada, including snorkeling south of Ensenada not that far from where those poor surfers had the ultimate rotten experience. => give up the vehicle, walk out. We love Mexico. [1] Uh... well there was that one time decades ago when we were hiking on a remote trail in the N. Georgia mountains and we got held up at gunpoint by a bandido in flip flops(!). I gave him the $2 in my wallet and we hiked back out of there pronto!.
- javier_e06 2y agoAvocado trees are formidable plants. As tall as an Oak. They grow fast like Magnolias. I wish grocery stores in the US were forced to publish the amount of produce the thrash every month. It would be a good contrast to show how many $2.50 a piece avocados are sold versus and how many are thrashed.