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The US government has stopped inspecting avocados and mangoes grown in western Mexico after its agents were assaulted and detained at a roadblock, as criminal violence drags on the high-value export sector.
A spokesperson for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said on Tuesday that inspections in the state of Michoacán would be paused until the security situation had been reviewed and safeguards put in place. The move follows a similar shutdown in February 2022, when inspectors were directly threatened by criminal groups.
“This is huge. Cartel violence in #Mexico is now unambiguously hitting the domestic economy, and relations with the North, in a manner simple even for casual observers to understand,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice-president of lobby group the Council of the Americas and the Americas Society, on X. “This is a bright red warning light flashing brightly on the dashboard.”
Mexico supplies more than 80 per cent of the avocados consumed in the US, with exports worth $2.7bn last year, according to government data.
The vast majority come from Michoacán, the western state where Mexico’s government launched a “war on drugs” in 2006 that led to a jump in homicides. Since then the state has been plagued by fighting between increasingly fragmented criminal groups.
Under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, drug trafficking and broader organised criminal groups have tightened their grip on swaths of Mexico, with the US military estimating that they now control as much of a third of the country.
This means that the state presence in many towns is limited or ineffective, with day-to-day security instead run by armed criminal groups or local self-defence forces.
In the campaigns for local and national elections this month more than 30 candidates, mostly for mayoralties, were murdered as the groups vied to control the outcome.
The US inspectors, part of an agency responsible for pest control, were held up at a blockade by residents in the town of Aranza last week, according to local media reports.
Michoacán state Governor Alfredo Ramírez told Mexican radio station Radio Fórmula that the inspectors’ car had not been targeted in the blockade and that he was working with the US embassy to try to restart the food checks in the coming days.
Mangos and avocados already in transit were not affected by the pause in inspections, but no new produce can undergo safety inspection and be readied for export.
A direct threat to inspectors in February 2022 led to a similar shutdown of inspections.
Mexico is now the US’s biggest trading partner, exporting cars, oil and agricultural products. It is also the biggest producer of avocados in the world, sending produce to dozens of countries — but its northern neighbour remains its biggest market.
The expansion of Mexico’s avocado market since it signed a free trade agreement with the US and Canada in the 1990s has gone hand in hand with rising levels of violence and criminal networks, security analysts at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime said in a report this year.
“International demand and organised crime groups have shaped a multibillion-dollar industry in which politico-criminal relations continue to play a crucial role,” the report said.
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