Friday, August 09, 2019

Killed for the avocado trade??

In The Guardian's report of a gruesome scene in a Mexican city:
The merciless dogfight between Mexican drug cartels has produced its latest macabre spectacle with the discovery of 19 mutilated corpses – nine of them hung semi-naked from a bridge – in a city to the west of the capital.

it goes on to note that the cartels fight is not just over drugs, but more importantly, over avocados (!):
Falko Ernst, an International Crisis Group researcher who studies Mexico’s cartels, said this week’s slaughter was clearly intended to intimidate rival criminal groups, the families of their members, as well as Mexican authorities.

Ernst said the bloodbath was partly about the struggle for control of Uruapan’s local drug trade. But a more important motivation was the fight for the region’s billion-dollar avocado industry. “The big magnet here is avocados,” he said.
 
What a sad, strange country - which I would like to visit if only it didn't have such appalling problems.

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