The Avocado Murders
When I was thirteen, my father put my brother and me to work on our avocado ranch during the summer. Up until then, and now as a teenager, my day consisted of sleeping in, followed by doing nothing. Unless there was surf. But on the ranch, we were up by five and in the fields working side by side with the “illegal” Mexican workers who didn’t speak a lick of English. It was intimidating at first but fun as the weeks rolled by.
Before the Israelis invented the drip system, my brother and I were the drip system. My 125-pound body would drag a hundred-foot hose weighing a ton and filled with water, and would lug it up and down the mountain. Then the two of us would stand by each tree – thousands of them – giving them a splash of water. Boring. Long before cell phones and ear buds.
Little did I know at the time, but I ended up making a fifty-year career out of being an avocado farmer.
Avocado Production Explodes
In 1978, the California Avocado Commission (CAC) had been formed. Prior to that, growers were just a bunch of disjointed farmers handing their fruit over to packing houses and waiting to see what they would get paid. The CAC changed all that and unified the industry for good. The market for avos expanded and prices started to climb. There was one voice and one marketing agency and soon California avocados became a household name.
On January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) rolled into place and created quite a ruckus among avocado growers. It meant Mexico would now be allowed to compete directly with California with its avocados. My father was one of the rare ones who wasn’t against it. He felt since the Mexican avocado harvest period wasn’t the same as California’s it would keep avocados on the shelf year-round, turning the delightful tree-grown fruit into a staple.
Eventually the industry adjusted, adding Peru, Israel, and Chile to the mix to compete with California growers. In the long run, the avocado market expanded, and the fruit became more and more valuable. So valuable that the Mexican cartels branched out from coke and weed to become fruit growers.
Which takes me to the crux of this column.
Cartels Control Mexico’s “Green Gold”
Countries like China, Russia, and Iran, have no love for us. But it’s the country that shares the soil where there is no longer a southern border that’s far from being our friend. Mexico is equally as complicit as the Biden administration in allowing the ongoing human invasion to take place. Not only do the cartels control the drug trade, human trafficking, and the government of Mexico itself, the cartels also control the “green gold” avocado industry, along with berries and numerous other fruits and vegetables.
Today, four out of five of the avocados Americans consume come from Mexico. The cartels have deforested 25,000 acres of pines, destroying the summer home of the monarch butterfly, the downstream water supply, and water for the remaining forests needed to survive. We are not only making the cartels wealthy by aiding and abetting their child- and drug-trafficking operations but we’re supporting them further by buying and consuming avocados, blueberries and almost every other produce grown in Mexico.
Killing Forests and Butterflies
The current U.S. administration has accepted the drug deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans as just part of doing business. As we know, the ingredients to produce fentanyl are imported from China through Mexico. But we’ve lost the ag war too.
Avocado prices are good these days, so it’s hard for American growers to complain. But it’s ironic that avocados have become a staple at the expense of destroying forests and butterflies and making billionaires out of killers.
Our government and environmentalists have gone blind to the amount of trash, human waste, and destruction of the land taking place in and around our southern border, and the ongoing pollution of the Rio Grande.
They’re also blind when it comes to growing avocados and other produce in Mexico. Here in Santa Barbara, there’s always talk about protecting the butterflies. We are told climate change is the reason for lower numbers. I say avocados play a big role.
What can we do?
Well, nothing.
The Avocado Murders
You won’t be seeing buses loaded with left-leaning environmental warriors taking up arms against the cartels to protect Mexican forests. There were over ten thousand murders in Michoacán in 2022, the state that produces most of Mexico’s avocados. Two butterfly activists were murdered back in 2020. “But the murders of environmentalist Homero Gómez González and tour guide Raúl Hernández Romero — two butterfly activists who worked at Mexico’s El Rosario monarch butterfly sanctuary — shocked the small, peaceful community in Michoacán.”
You won’t see Americans putting a stop to eating avocados any more than you’ll see the homeless on the streets no longer using fentanyl. And you won’t see our government growing a set to close the border to stop human trafficking. So why bother to place restrictions on avocados coming into the U.S. if they are from cartel-controlled farms?
All we’ll keep hearing is we have to do our part to save the environment and be punished for something we have no control over.
In the meantime, pass the guacamole.
Henry Schulte is also the author of six children’s books. Faith the Flag, his newest, is now available for sale on Amazon. Perfect timing for this election year.
Money in politics is often/ usually a very corrupting influence. People can be bought off, and some are looking for opportunities to enrich themselves in the guise of being “ public servants”
Money has polluted the flowers- to-marijuana transformation of once lovely Carpinteria, and has created chaos with the cartels in the narcotic and avocado business. All of this is a good reason to elect two new SB supervisors - Roy Lee to replace Das Williams, and Frank Troise to replace Joan Hartman.
Sitting around, complaining about our little piece of paradise being destroyed by liberal politicians, and not voting them out, is useless.
It seems strange that America is constantly at war with countries overseas, yet not even a slingshot is let loose against Mexico. I read just the other day that our trade with China is falling, putting Mexico at the top level as our trading partner. Does this, I wonder, include their exports to America of drugs that are killing more than 100,000 Americans a year?
If Mexico exported guns to America that killed more than more than 100,000 Americans a year, punitive actions by America against Mexico to stop the trade would be severe.
Does trade volume include the 5.5 million a year, mainly male, illegal immigrants that entered our country in 2022 & 2023, causing enormous social problems and $Billions in costs across America?
Mexico is a state dominated and controlled by criminal gangs that who have corrupted not only local state governments, but also they are entrenched in the national government and law enforcement across the country.
Furthermore, courtesy of the Biden administration, the Mexican Narco- terrorists now control our borders and are infiltrating our cities with trafficking in drugs and human beings for exploitation.