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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

> I really like this as a study of healthy trade.

https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/mexicos-avocado-boom-a...

> While the European Union and Mexico are in the final rounds of negotiations towards the “modernization” of the EU-Mexico Trade Agreement (Global Agreement) our objective is to understand the dynamics of violence that accompanied the avocado boom, including organized crime activities, human rights violations, environmental crime and harm, and the potential impact of further liberalizing trade between Mexico and the EU.

> ...

> Increased international demand led to an expansion of land dedicated to avocado production, to the detriment of forest cover, resulting in deforestation and the subsequent degradation of soil, water, and biodiversity.

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Violence cartels that have amassed more power than militaries (go to tiktok and see for yourself, they are literally flashing their attack helicopters, military grade weapons and armored vehicles) will use violence to control the flow of any commodity and asset.

Avocados are not the problem. The cartels will get their cut one way or the other.

The US currently have several spy planes over Mexico with cooperation from the Mexican government. Information is being relayed to the Mexican military and cartels are being neutralized as we speak. There just isn't much news about this at the moment. The US / Mexican military and law enforcement are all currently working together in both training exercises and cartel take-downs. The only thing missing is US military boots on the ground. My only known-unknown is how long this will take given the large numbers of cartel members that have splintered off from their original groups.

That has been the case for decades. And they also have boots on the ground. How else do they arrest the head of the cartels and fly them to the US all these years ?

I don’t see your point.

That has been the case for decades.

False. The US just deployed spy planes to Mexico in the last couple of months after approval by Mexico. Doing so without their permission would have been an act of war.

In 1992 the CIA was flying planes over Medellin, and the intel (along with DEA boots on the ground) eventually helped with taking down Escobar.

A simple google search can show articles from the era.

Medellin is Colombia, not Mexico.

Also, the Colombian Cartels are a different set of organizations that have different origins from the Mexican Cartels - the former being a side effect of the Colombian Civil War and the latter being a side effect of the 1990s Peso Crisis and the mass layoffs in the Mexican Army and Petrochemicals industry

Read or watch "100 Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez. The fissures of the 1899-1903 Colombian Civil War (4-10% of Colombians died) were never resolved and it morphed into "La Violencia" which then morphed into the ongoing Colombian conflict.

You need money to buy weapons, so Colombian insurgent groups (right and left leaning) entered the drug trade to arm themselves - especially after the USSR reduced funding in the 70s-80s to concentrate on Afghanistan.

You see the same dynamics in Afghanistan, Syria, and Myanmar.

The point I was replying to was that deployment of spy planes against cartels was something that happened first time in February of 2025. The parent claimed that this has never happened before because it would have been considered an act of war.

This is not the case. The US intelligence has been deploying forces in Latin America against cartels for long long time.

The US had the permission of Colombia's government at the time because the US was already there helping with the Colombian Conflict. It was part of SOUTHCOM [0].

Mexico withheld permission for American military and intelligence deployments from 1990 to 2025 (DEA and other law enforcement was allowed), but they changed recently.

> The parent claimed that this has never happened before because it would have been considered an act of war.

Because it has never happened before in Mexico. It has been political suicide to even consider allowing foreign troops in Mexico because of the memory of the French Occupation.

You cannot treat "Latin America" as a monolith. Each country has a different sociopolitical background and history.

[0] - https://www.southcom.mil/About/History/SOUTHCOMs-60th-Annive...

Come on these are just semantics. There are literally photos of Americans in unmarked uniforms at the arrest of Guzman. You can slap the DEA logo to anyone and carry on your mil operation. I understand that no country wants the US military getting involved, so DEA is the best PR formula. Solves the problem and your people do not revolt.

But let's not fool ourselves. These are American operations taking place in Mexican soil (with the cooperation of the Mexican forces of course, it was not an attack against Mexico).

Maybe you should admit you confused mexico and Colombia. The difference is not just a semantics. They are different countries.

No? I just mentioned the earliest case of US vs cartels I am aware of. I could have used any of the Mexican drug lord cases available (and they are many).

All including dea with intel and actual boots in Mexico.

The semantics comment was on the point that this is not technically the US military. Sure it is not the military it just has access to its personel and equipment.

> Sure it is not the military it just has access to its personel and equipment.

It does not have access to the same equipment or (more critically) personel - especially in intelligence, as intelligence ops were not allowed either until the Sheinbaum admin.

I was referring to "all these years" as in happening all the time, not that it has never occurred. The US has always requested permission to enter the Mexican air space.

The CIA operated as a rogue organization for many decades and that has been curtailed in the last couple of decades. As a side note I am still of the opinion that is who actually created bitcoin and what replaced the drug money which I am in support of as there are less lives lost and they just get the desperate people. That should significantly reduce their dependency on South America as a source of income but now I am delving into whacky-ping-pong-ding-dong conspiracy theories.

It seems you think the cartel and the government are separate. They are actually one, mexico is a narco state.

I love mexico btw

Mexico's problem is and always will be America. Canada managed to dodge it because they were under the protection of the British empire.

Mexico’s problem is Mexico. It is a rich country but the distribution of the wealth is one of the worst on earth. If you go to a Mexican Porsche meetup you will understand.

Inequality has been an issue, but it was the Peso crisis and the outsourcing of Mexican manufacturing to China that caused the spiral that made the cartels as powerful as they are today.

Jalisco, Sinaloa, and Nayarit are major petrochemical hubs in Mexico, but when Mexico entered the Peso crisis in the 1990s and China ascended into the WTO in 2000, a major bout of deindustrialization happened in that region.

Turns out chemistry is chemistry, so you had plenty of unemployed chemical engineers and soldiers (the Mexican government did mass layoffs in the army during the peso crisis) which meant you had the brains and muscle needed to enter the drug manufacturing space.

Drugs and cartels were a problem in Mexico before the peso crisis of the 1990s.

Traffic, for example, came out in 2000 and was based on the ongoing drug war in Mexico. The primary antagonists are the Tijuana Cartel, was formed in the 1980s out of the remnants of the Gaudalara Cartel originally formed in the late 1970s, and the Juarez Cartel, originally formed in 1970. Both cartels have since been superseded by more violent cartels.

I'm not saying they weren't a problem before, but the power of the Mexican cartels only really took hold after the Peso crisis. The pre-90s cartels, while significant, never had the same level of control that cartels had by the early 2000s.

Heck, Los Zetas is a notable example, where a bunch of pissed off special forces broke bad because a government salary during the peso devaluation just wouldn't cut it.

Same with the professionalization of synthetic drug manufacturing during the mass layoffs at Pemex during the 1990s.

> Traffic, for example, came out in 2000 and was based on the ongoing drug war in Mexico

Yep! After the Mexican economy straight up collapsed during the 1994 Peso Crisis and the Salinas administration began mass layoffs at Pemex in the early 1990s.

It's ridiculous to ignore the effects of the Peso Crisis and the offshoring of Mexican manufacturing when also talking about the rise of the Cartels during the 1990s-2000s.

Mexico's GDP collapsed by 6.5% in just 1 year (comparable to Lebanon's 2019 Liquidity Crisis), the inflation rate jumped to 35%, real wages fell by 35%, unemployment jumped from 3.9% to 7.9%, and infant mortality rates spiked from 5% to 12% all in just 1 year (1995).

This was a straight up economic collapse that made cartel employment (or hopping the border) enticing

>It is a rich country but the distribution of the wealth is one of the worst on earth

No? There are countries that are far more unequal. Even US is higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_of_Wealt...

To be fair I think the exact same thing about my own government.

Watch the episode of Rotten that features the avocado trade. What country's govt acts the "exact same?" One example would be kidnapping to extort farmers, causing them to lose their farm and livelihood

If you mean the US, I don't agree. It has a long way yet to get there, but it's fighting really hard and making great progress at becoming more like a criminal gang.

Which government is that which is comparable to Mexican cartels?

On violence: sure, let's investigate it. I'm truly unsure if avocado production is a significant progenitor of violence, especially when compared to the prosperity it affords to the growers.

> Increased international demand led to an expansion of land dedicated to avocado production

I'm sensitive to that. That is my point on California.

>to the detriment of forest cover, resulting in deforestation and the subsequent degradation of soil, water, and biodiversity.

I just love when developed countries (mine included) that have already cut down most of their forest cover get all in arms when a developing country wants to improve it's economy at a cost of cutting down some of their forests.

Who's up in arms? Certainly not me.

I'm just pointing out that this trade isn't really unusual, there's the typical tradeoffs involved.

This is all used by the EU for protectionist reasons to try to extract an unfair advantage in the trade negotiations.

Let's see if the EU is as concerned about the environmental impact of all those tanks that they are building.

EU does not have a choice when it comes to "building tanks". There is expanding Russia and America supporting them while being very hostile to EU.

EU did wanted and tried to cooperate in win-win setup with America, it is America who decided they want to attack former allies.

> Let's see if the EU is as concerned about the environmental impact of all those tanks that they are building.

The alternative is an Anglo-French nuclear strike. The tanks are a lot less environmentally damaging, relatively speaking.

The fact that EU uses it for protectionist reasons does not make it wrong or untrue, though. And frankly, if cost reduction is based on destruction of earth and slavery-like working conditions in cartel-controlled lands, it makes sense to disincentivise these at least, if not boycott completely. The problem with EU doing it for protectionist reasons is that it does not apply similar standards for what is happening inside the EU, eg re:working conditions in strawberry production.

For the military industry part, I completely agree. This applies already to certain war situations that were and keep being encouraged.

Eating avocados is not a necessity. Protecting yourself against a mad dictator invading your neighbours is. Especially if the USA is ruled by an imbecile clown that cannot think further than his belly button.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

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