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Inside Mexico’s anti-avocado militias
The long read: The spread of the avocado is a story of greed, ambition, corruption, water shortages, cartel battles and, in a number of towns and villages, a fierce fightback
Even though my arrival had been cleared with the government of Cherán in advance, the armed guard at the highway checkpoint, decked out in full fatigues, the wrong shade to pass for Mexican military uniform, refused to wave me through. The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), when it went into effect in 1994, largely kept the ban in place, but crippling droughts and exorbitant land and water costs eventually pushed California’s industries into accepting a slow repeal of protections. Sitting at one of the two desks in Martinez’s corner office, bottle-feeding her four-month-old child, was Maria Elena Soria Morales, a 33-year-old school teacher who is now serving a two-year term as the head of security, elected alongside another woman.
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