Originally part of La Familia and later the Knights Templar cartel, which emerged in 2011 after the government crackdown, the Viagras later joined a government-run rural police force designed to topple the cartels.and military-style training, so they returned to crime.
Scaling trees and clipping avocados pays much better than many jobs in Mexico — $60 a day compared with the $5 minimum wage — but it increasingly comes with serious risks. One driver, who was heaving 45-pound crates of avocados into a tractor-trailer, said that in the last six months he has been held up twice by armed men who forced him to drive to a safe house and unload there.
Security has become so tenuous that in June a group of avocado producers bought ads in several national newspapers warning of an “irreparable impact” to the industry unless officials address the problem. Working with the local avocado trade association, the producers armed their own civilian police force, built guard towers at the entrances to every town and orchestrated a takeover of the municipal government by ensuring that only one mayoral candidate — theirs — was on the ballot.Members of an armed police force patrol in Tancitaro, Mexico.
latimes
That breaks my heart.
Reporter katelinthicum has been covering violence in Mexico extensively over the past year. Earlier this month, she covered the attack that killed nine U.S. citizens — three women and six children — in northern Mexico.
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