Drug Cartel 2.0

In the decade leading up to 2015, the state of Michoacán endured an average of over 800 murders annually. By contrast, New York City, which has nearly double the population, had 290 homicides.

Perhaps the most famous Mexican crime syndicate is the Zetas, a group of former army commandos. In the 1990s, they became an enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel before breaking out on their own. The Zetas have profited from the sex trade, protection rackets and other forms of extortion, human trafficking, and most famously, drugs. They engaged in bribery—buying off top officials—but often found brutality to be more productive. The remains of their tortured victims have been a crucial part of the communications efforts of a gang that, for years, had the widest geographic reach in all of Mexico.

In some ways, the Zetas created a model of organized criminality in Michoacán that proved to be the crime groups’ most enduring legacy there.

La Familia (Michoacána) was just one of the rising cartels that seized on the brutal mob template and ate away at the Zetas’ revenue-generating enterprises. In 2006, black-clad, rifle-bearing members of La Familia, a splinter group of the Zetas, burst into a bar in Michoacán and tossed five severed human heads onto a packed dance floor. It was the local coming-out for a rising crime syndicate.

The avocado industry, meanwhile, was surging in value. In the mid-1990s, before the North American Free Trade Agreement facilitated the import of foreign avocados, the typical American ate about a pound of California-grown “butter fruit” each year. In recent years, the average American has gobbled more than seven pounds of mostly imported avocados annually. In 2017, avocado imports to the United States were worth well over $2 billion—and the vast majority came from Michoacán.