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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

"two U.S.D.A. inspectors had been illegally detained at a checkpoint run by community members. In Michoacán, which stretches from the mountains west of Mexico City to the Pacific Ocean, some Indigenous communities have set up security patrols to defend themselves against criminal groups."

So it was not the drug cartels, but anti-cartel militas suspecting the inspectors to be connected to the cartels? Or what was their motivation? Just protecting their local turf/state?

Did they know they were US avocado inspectors?

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This Guardian piece does a decent job of explaining the background of the local militias: https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/jun/11/inside-...

Thank you. Fantastic article.

This sums it up.. it always comes down to ‘California’s Water War.’

CA Ag is devastating. There is so much more to this story.

[..]Today, groundwater in Michoacán is disappearing and its bodies of water are drying up. Lake Zirahuén is polluted by agricultural runoff. Nearly 85% 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 100-mile avocado corridor has, in effect, become the only live theatre 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.[..]

But in this case the "local state" is legal and has officially banned Avocados. So why should those people have any buisness with US inspectors? They shouldn't be there?

But maybe it is a connected case, of an area where there are Avocados, but local militias want to get rid of them.

“Community members”… color me skeptical. Anyone standing in the way of the cartels is killed (plus their family and neighbors). Usually these checkpoints are setup looking for rival cartel members and shaking down locals. I suspect the inspectors refused to pay or failed to offer to pay to pass through.

No, you're wrong. There are really community defense organizations and communities that have set up checkpoints against cartel violence. It's well known, well documented and there's even a link above to one particularly well known case of these organizations fighting the cartels. Some of them do eventually get infiltrated by gangs or turn into something similar, but not always. The idea that absolutely nobody stands in the way of the cartels is not only false but also paints an ignorantly defeatist narrative about their power.

Even the apparatus of the state in Mexico could stand in their way, or crush them, but due to a complex multitude of factors, it doesn't and appears weaker than they are though it's in fact stronger and in a certain way the senior partner in the tacit arrangements cartels and formal authorities create.

There is a history of local militias in Michoacán so this does not seem so far fetched. https://insightcrime.org/investigations/mexico-security-rise...

The cartels might also be smarter, than to mess with US inspectors. Because stopping the Avocado trade, does not make you friends at home.

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