SANTA ANA ZIROSTO, Mexico (AP) — It is a long and sometimes dangerous journey for truckers transporting the avocados destined for guacamole on tables and…
It starts in villages like Santa Ana Zirosto, high in the misty, pine-clad mountains of the western Mexico state of Michoacan. The roads are so dangerous — beset by drug cartels, common criminals, and extortion and kidnap gangs — that state police provide escorts for the trucks brave enough to face the 40-mile trip to packing and shipping plants in the city of Uruapan.Sign up to receive daily headline news from Ottawa Citizen, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
Mexico supplies about 92% of U.S. avocado imports, sending north over $3 billion worth of the fruit every year.“They would take away our trucks and the fruit, sometimes they’d take the truck as well,” Quintero said. “They would steal two or three trucks per day in this area.”Article content State police officer Jorge Gonzalez said the convoys escort about 40 trucks a day, ensuring that around 300 tons of avocados reach the packing plants each day.
“The main people affected are the producers,” Valencia said. “People were losing three or four trucks every day. There were a lot of robberies between the orchard and the packing house.”Once the avocados reach Uruapan or the neighboring city of Tancitaro — the self-proclaimed avocado capital of the world that greets visitors with a giant cement avocado — the path to the north is somewhat safer.
The inspections were halted for about 10 days after a U.S. inspector was threatened in Michoacan, where growers are routinely subject to extortion by drug cartels. Some Michoacan packers were reportedly buying avocados from other, non-certified states and trying to pass them off as being from Michoacan and were angry the U.S. inspector wouldn’t go along with that.
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