https://www.bing.com/search?q=El+Mar...=1&form=HPNN01
Videos show the pre-dawn capture by federal and state authorities of José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, who is known by the alias "El Marro," which means "the Sledgehammer." He was detained along with five others in a raid that authorities said also freed a kidnapped businesswoman.
The capture of Yépez Ortiz, one of the most high-profile arrests by the Mexican government in years, highlights the contradictory nature of the security policies pushed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has vowed to fight crime by eradicating poverty and break with the militarized strategies of his predecessors but who in practice has not always done so.
It also casts a focus on the changing nature of
Mexico's criminal organizations, which have branched out far beyond transnational drug trafficking and are now engaged in cargo robbery, domestic drug sales and control of industries as diverse as gold mining and the avocado trade.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation...lence-avocados
URUAPAN, Mexico — The cartel members showed up in this verdant stretch of western Mexico armed with automatic weapons and chainsaws.
Soon they were cutting timber day and night, the crash of falling trees echoing throughout the virgin forest. When locals protested, explaining that the area was protected from logging, they were held at gunpoint and ordered to keep quiet.
Stealing wood was just a prelude to a more ambitious plan.
The newcomers, members of a criminal group called the Viagras, were almost certainly clearing the forest to set up a grow operation. They wouldn’t be planting marijuana or other crops long favored by Mexican cartels, but something potentially even more profitable: avocados.
Mexico’s multibillion-dollar avocado industry, headquartered in Michoacan state, has become a prime target for cartels, which have been seizing farms and clearing protected woodlands to plant their own groves of what locals call “green gold.”
More than a dozen criminal groups are battling for control of the avocado trade in and around the city of Uruapan, preying on wealthy orchard owners, the laborers who pick the fruit and the drivers who truck it north to the United States.
Connect With Us