Crime Corners Avocado and Poppy Producers. It’s a Narco-Economy

In the hearts of the people of Chichihualco beats a peculiar pride. A mark of prestige in the forgotten mountains of Guerrero.  They boast that their two main products, which they export throughout Mexico and the world, possess a superior, unparalleled quality: soccer balls and opium poppies.

“Here, the best soccer balls in the country are sewn by hand, and here grows the best ingredient in the world for making heroin,” said Hortencio Jiménez proudly, whom I met in 2024 on a trip to the poppy fields near Chilpancingo.

“We are soccer and organized crime,” the taxi driver summarized masterfully, the same driver who every October and November puts down the steering wheel to go and supervise dozens of poppy growers working clandestinely.

According to Hortencio, the poppy from Chichihualco has qualities that make it “a thousand times better” than those from Afghanistan and Burma, the main exporting countries: altitude, humidity, and soil create the perfect trifecta in Guerrero. If its cultivation were legal, he believes, it would transform the impoverished farmers of the town into wealthy landowners. The government could buy this wonderful reddish-flowered plant to make morphine and supply public hospitals that treat patients with chronic pain with analgesics. But organized crime monopolizes its purchase.

“Here, the ones in charge are Los Ardillos. You can’t sell to another group because they’ll kill you. A few years ago, a man kept some flowers in a bag to show the quality of the ‘opium poppy’ to people from the opposing faction. They found out and killed him in front of his children,” Hortencio told me, assuring me that “Los Ardillos buy 100% of the crop.”

At first glance, it would seem a blessing to have a client who buys all the production. If anything has plagued Mexican agriculture—both legal and illegal—it is the lack of buyers. Flowers, fruits, and vegetables rot before they are acquired by someone who will distribute them throughout Mexico and the world.

But having only one buyer is, in reality, a curse: Los Ardillos can set the purchase price, sometimes as low as 4,000 pesos per kilo of poppy, when in Sinaloa the price can reach up to 20,000 pesos per kilo. And you can only sell to them.

This economic model has a little-known name. Almost all of us are familiar with the concept of a “monopoly,” a single seller who dominates the market and can, for example, set high prices for consumers. But in the mountains of Guerrero, there is the other side of the coin: it is called a “monopsony,” and it refers to having a single buyer who dominates the market and, from that position of power, can haggle down the prices of producers until they are practically worthless.

This is the direction in which the new modality of organized crime in Mexico is heading. The cartels also understand economics. Organized crime is following the “blood diamonds” tactic.

One of the most famous monopolies of the 20th century was built hand in hand with organized crime. Between 1900 and the 1990s, the De Beers company exercised absolute control over the production, distribution, and sale of diamonds globally. If you wanted one, you could only buy it from De Beers, which, thanks to being the sole seller, was able to set exorbitant prices and popularize the idea that a diamond engagement ring should be worth the equivalent of three months of a prospective husband’s salary.

To justify this artificial price increase, the Luxembourg-based company created a successful advertising campaign in 1947. The slogan was “A diamond is forever,” which, in reality, was intended to conceal their deception: to prevent any woman, even a divorced one, from selling the diamond from her wedding ring.

If she did, she would realize that the real value of a diamond is very low. Thanks to this monopoly, De Beers cemented in the world the false idea that a diamond is a luxury item and that it is in bad taste to appraise it after purchase.

But De Beers was not only a monopoly; it was also a monopsony. In Sierra Leone, the company became the sole buyer of diamonds after the discovery of thousands of underground diamond mines. It consolidated this position by hiring clandestine groups that violently displaced any competitors. Thanks to this, it bought diamonds for pennies from Sierra Leoneans who worked in conditions similar to slavery. Being the only buyer allowed them to set starvation wages.

De Beers mixed these illegally obtained minerals, acquired at rock-bottom prices, with the legal production from other countries. The profits were so high that the company regularly paid these armed gangs, which went from being their bodyguards to becoming economically powerful enough to participate in a civil war that left more than 120,000 dead and sought total control of Sierra Leone’s natural resources. That historical episode is known as “blood diamonds,” so famous that it became the subject of a film of the same name directed by Edward Zwick and starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Now, organized crime in Mexico has already mastered this technique. Only they know whether it was through a rigorous study of the worst practices of capitalism or a kind of self-taught violence, but increasingly, the cartels have become monopsonies. They are no longer interested in being the last link in the chain—the one that sells—but the first and only one: the one that buys.

“In Chichihualco, Los Ardillos have been the only buyers for more than five years. With that, they control everything: planting, cultivation, transportation, production, and sales. They are the kings around here. I say, doesn’t anyone think of legalizing opium poppies so that the government can take over the whole business?” Hortencio asked. “Are they stupid or corrupt?”

The hunting supply stores could only sell weapons and ammunition to Los Zetas.

The story of the poppy growers reminded me of the sport shooters in Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas. Every year, between November and February, the bird hunting season opens: white-winged doves, quail, ducks, and more are in the sights of hundreds of travelers in the northern part of the state. What many hunters don’t know is that, despite having a hunting license and the ranches having the necessary permits, every shot fired represents money that goes into the pockets of the Gulf Cartel.

“This started with Los Zetas. They were the first to tell us that we could only sell rifles, ammunition, scopes—even fishing hooks—to their people. If you sold to someone else, and they caught you, they would summon you to give you a beating. And if you did it again, they would kill you,” says Eleazar M., a seller of legal hunting cartridges.

In this way, Los Zetas had complete control of weapons in Tamaulipas. They controlled the larger caliber weapons through bribes to members of the National Defense; the smaller caliber, but still lethal, sporting weapons were monopolized through the control they exerted over hunting supply stores.

“When they needed money, or wanted to cover their tracks regarding a rifle or a pistol, they would resell the same product to you. Of course, at double or triple the price. And you had to file off the serial number or change the parts because you knew that someone had been killed with that weapon. It was very difficult having them as our only buyers,” he says.

When Los Zetas were dismantled, and control of the state remained in the hands of the Gulf Cartel, the monopsony strategy was maintained: it’s an open secret in Ciudad Mier that they are the sole buyers of sporting weapons, creating an artificial shortage of ammunition, which allows them to raise the price of bullets, especially for American hunters who travel from Texas. Most of them don’t know that they are buying bullets at inflated prices.

The avocado growers of Apatzingán also have only one buyer.

This economic phenomenon also occurs with the crops favored by organized crime. For example, the avocado growers in northern Apatzingán, Michoacán, in the community of Santiago Acahuato, also have only one buyer: the Acahuato Cartel, a criminal group comprised of religious fanatics, fake self-defense groups, and ruthless drug traffickers.

The cartel, led by a mysterious man known as El Señor de la Virgen (The Lord of the Virgin), only operates in this small community in the Tierra Caliente region. Beyond the town limits are larger criminal organizations such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel or the United Cartels, so the Acahuato Cartel cannot expand. They kill, extort, rob, and terrorize only the avocado growers in the community.

Because no one else can buy their avocados, the people of Apatzingán suffer from the volatility of their sole customer. Sometimes, the cartel pays wages up to 40% lower than other avocado growers in Michoacán, under the pretext that they are financing the festival of the Virgin of Acahuato. At other times, they force them to stop working for up to two weeks to create a fabricated shortage and justify a price increase.

In an ideal scenario, the avocado growers of Acahuato could choose to work for two, three, or four clients who would compete for the town’s best harvest. To obtain the best possible avocados, these clients would compete for the best labor force with attractive working conditions: one company might pay more per day, another would offer better health insurance, and yet another would provide shorter working hours. The avocado picker would choose their best client.

But that freedom does not exist in northern Apatzingán. The Acahuato Cartel controls everything: from harvesting to packaging and transportation out of the state. They have even imposed a set of work rules with arbitrary and terrible penalties. “If you don’t cut enough avocados during the day, you get whipped. If you don’t fill the boxes properly, you get beaten with planks. If you keep avocados to eat at home or sell them elsewhere, they hang you, seriously, from a tree and beat you like a piñata. And nobody can say anything, because if the cartel stops buying from you, the next one could be worse. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” a local journalist told me.

“The worst thing is having only one buyer: you become their slave.”

The phenomenon of the “criminal monopsony” is also visible in the silver mines in Zacatecas, the vaping industry in Mexico City, the tortilla business in Guerrero, the timber industry in Chihuahua, and construction materials, such as rebar and sand, in the State of Mexico.

“You would think that the worst thing that can happen to you is having a poppy field that blooms every year and having no one to buy from you. Well, no. The worst thing is having only one buyer because you become their slave. They really do apply the phrase ‘the customer is always right,’” Hortencio said in our conversation in Chilpancingo, a city also under the yoke of Los Ardillos.

This is the narco-economy of our times: the cartels have gone from controlling the criminal supply to controlling the economic demand. A business model in which the most important thing can be summarized in one word: subjugation.

Source: Milenio