The attack began early Tuesday morning. Residents woke up to the sound of gunshots, which continued throughout the day. Four powerful explosions, believed to have come from explosives dropped by drones, shook their homes. By the end of the terrifying attack, no one knows how many had died, as the victims were swept away by the two rival cartels whose gang war had spread so bloodily to the streets of the small Mexican town of Buenavista.
However, this savagery was not due to the enormous profits that would be made from smuggling illegal drugs, but rather the control of the region’s lime production.
Mexico is the world’s second largest producer of this fruit, which is exported around the world, including Great Britain, where it is flavored in margaritas, salsas and tacos, and much more.
Gangs are waging a deadly turf war to control that lucrative business, running protection rackets to impose “taxes” on farmers trying to make a living. Workers who defy their threats and extortion demands risk being killed, kidnapped, losing their homes, or being exiled.
An armed member of Pueblos Unidos poses in front of the Welcome sign to the municipality of Ario de Rosales
A woman buys lemons at a market in Morelia, Michoacán State, Mexico
A prominent local figure suggested to me that up to 3,000 lemon growers may have been culled in the last decade in Michoacán, the western state that includes Buenavista.
And it’s like the war for Sicilian lemons that Cosa Nostra started.
Fruit farming and organized crime have a long shared history.
The mafia, or Cosa Nostra, emerged in Sicily in the 19th century after lemons became popular when doctors realized they contained vitamin C that could combat scurvy. The island’s farmers saw the business opportunity and began to expand their production and export their lemons around the world.
But the criminals also knew the value of lemons and began to seize the crops of defenseless farmers. And thus the first of the mob’s infamous protection rackets was born. The farmers agreed to pay the ‘gangsters’ to prevent the theft of their fruit.
They would protect groves, rural roads used to transport fruit, and the docks from which lemons were exported. But by the 20th century protection businesses had expanded to include bars, gambling, and unions.
The Grecos, one of the most powerful crime families in Italy and, later, the United States, began by renting a lemon tree.
have been massacred in Michoacán, the western state that includes Buenavista, in the last decade.
150,000 people are believed to have fled the state’s bloodshed for the United States. “The entire lime industry is controlled by gangs and there is a lack of freedom for producers,” the mayor of Buenavista, Sergio Báez, 59, told me. “So in a way, when people in Britain buy their limes, they contribute to organized crime.”
The fight for this market is so intense that gangsters have used land mines and grenade launchers. Last week, the municipality’s security forces seized at least 130 homemade explosive devices that would be launched by drones.
According to Michoacán’s governor, at least 14 organized gangs operate in the state, but a defiant Báez said: “We cannot be betrayed by fear.”
A lime producer told me: ‘Criminal groups have taken control of our city, control of our economy, control of our lives. This is not a life, living under the rule of a criminal enterprise in the face of authorities who seem complacent.’
Last week’s nighttime attack involved hitmen linked to the Tepalcatepec cartel who were trying to overthrow Los Viagras, a group known for their savagery allegedly led in the city by a man nicknamed La Sirena. This gang gained national infamy with a video titled No Mercy In Mexico, depicting the gruesome execution of a father and son accused of collaboration with rivals. The gangsters cut off the father’s head before ripping out his daughter’s heart.
A RIVAL clan posted videos six months ago of a new armed wing called Lime Special Forces. These showed gangsters in armored vehicles with insignia on military-style uniforms depicting two pistols and a skull inside a yellow file. Such is the state of terror that the farmer said that if Los Viagras were driven out by rivals or the military, they could be replaced by even more deranged gangsters, as has been seen so many times in Mexico’s tragic recent history.
“The Viagras became too ambitious, too nasty and aggressive towards the people,” said another city source, adding that many locals supported the insurgents in the hope of reducing the extortion and violence inflicted on them.
Security forces patrol the streets after the murder of Armando Pérez Luna
Lemons are washed in a packaging warehouse as the government establishes a police operation to stop extortion by criminal groups demanding protection money from lemon growers.
‘But why do people have to choose the lesser evil?’ they added. “There should be no evil at all: no quotas, no extraction of wealth, no control over people’s lives and the economy.”
The cartels also have their claws in the avocado business, as they initially saw the trade in both fruits as a way to launder drug money. But they quickly realized the potential to reap huge benefits from controlling these agricultural markets. Given that Buenavista produces 220,000 tonnes of lime a year, the tax the gangs impose on producers and packers nets them £22 million a year for this one scam in this one municipality.
“The equation is very simple: you pay or risk having criminals stop your next shipment on the road and burn it,” said one farmer. “So it’s cheaper to pay the extortionists.”
Most of the victims are poor rural workers who have no resources to escape. The gangs dictate prices, transportation and even what days of the week farmers are allowed to harvest. The workers, who normally earn around £20 a day selling their limes to packing plants, can only harvest their fruit on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
“It’s about control,” said Gregorio López, an outspoken priest and lime farmer from Buenavista who wore a bulletproof vest during services before being forced to flee for his life. ‘It’s a demonstration of power. They make the decisions.
He said the harvest ban allowed gangs to impose penalties such as seizing cars or houses if they disobeyed, and landmines were sometimes planted to prevent work on prohibited days. López said that lemon producers felt “betrayed, abandoned and at the mercy of crime” and that they were “disposable cannon fodder” in the gang wars that devastated much of Mexico.
He added that four years ago the 5,000 residents of a lime-producing town left overnight after threats intensified and gangsters began using drones armed with explosives. Since then, about 500 people have returned to the “ghost town.”
Limes are exported from Mexico to the United Kingdom, where they flavor margaritas, salsas, tacos and much more (file image)
At the end of our conversation, he asked me if I wanted to buy his lime tree, an offer I easily declined. When I was in Michoacán four years ago to investigate gangs taking over avocado plantations, nine people, including children as young as 12, were killed by gunmen who shot around an arcade near my hotel.
A study last year found that the drug cartels behind such massacres are Mexico’s fifth-largest employer, with around 175,000 members.
Other analysts have identified nearly 200 armed gangs in the country, and the number soared after an offensive against kingpins led to the fragmentation of the main cartels. Violence is expected to intensify ahead of upcoming elections as gangs fight for influence.
Drug cartels first entered the lime trade in 2010, burning down packing stations, demanding protection money and stealing land. This sparked a revolt three years later by armed vigilantes led by a farmer named Hipólito Mora, which drove the cartels out of the region and drew global attention.
His self-defense movement was quickly corrupted and his son murdered, but he remained an outspoken critic of both the gangs and the government’s insipid response.
The drug traffickers finally managed to assassinate Mora last June, shooting him and his bodyguards in an ambush as the vigilante leader headed to his home, which had been gunned down three days earlier. The bodies were burned in his truck in a grim show of force by the cartels.
Mora’s murder sparked national condemnation, followed by another outbreak of extortion and terrorism inflicted on lime and avocado farmers.
Despite the risks, Mora’s younger brother, Guadalupe, has returned home after nearly half a century in California to continue the fight against cartels, seek justice for his brother’s murder, and tend his own lime trees.
‘They killed Hipólito as soon as he raised his voice. “He talked about how organized crime was once again taking over the entire economy,” said Guadalupe, 64. “Now I speak.”
He knows the danger he faces, but he says it. ‘I am willing to risk my life for this just cause. There is no other way.’
Such is the life of a lime producer in this blood-soaked land.