Zeihan: The Mexican cartels are double-dipping in the guacamole

Mexican cartels are shifting their focus from drugs to running protection rackets around the increasingly valuable avocado trade. — Image credit: Getty Images

Mexican avocados have become a big business and an important part of the American culinary scene. U.S. consumption alone has skyrocketed from 436 million pounds in 1985 to over 2.7 billion pounds in 2022. This surging demand has led Mexican drug cartels to diversify their operations, branching out from traditional drug smuggling and human trafficking into the avocado industry.

Watch the above video as Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan explains why violent Mexican cartels are shifting their focus from drugs to “running protection rackets” around the increasingly valuable avocado trade.

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Excerpted from Peter’s Aug. 16 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:

Unless you want to start buying your guacamole in dime bags, the U.S. better start looking for some new avocado “dealers.” Yes, we’re talking about the cartels’ involvement in the avocado supply chains in Mexico.

Mexican cartels like Jalisco New Generation and La Nueva Familia Michoacán — which is allied with the Sinaloa cartel — are heavily involved in avocado production through protection rackets. While these cartels have different strategies, the bottom line is that any cartel involvement is dangerous to the sustainability of avocado exports.

As the cartels’ presence worsens, the U.S. better start looking elsewhere for their avocados.

This video was recorded during Zeihan’s backpacking trip through Yosemite in the end of July.

Hey everybody, welcome to my favorite new party. Pat on sped burger lake in Yosemite National Park, right alongside the Pacific Coast Trail. For the people who actually have to follow the trail, any who figured out would be a great time to talk about the geopolitics of everyone’s favorite party. Fader, guacamole. We’re having a problem with avocados. It seems that the Mexican cartels are starting to run protection rackets.
It’s worse than it sounds.
There are two groups, but doing most of the work and inhibiting production. The first one of the Jalisco new generation cartel who, if you remember from previous works, are,
well, there’s some bad characters. Their leader is a guy by the name of El mencho who basically believes that the first thing any cartel that’s self respecting should do is go into town, walk right into the police office in broad daylight and kill a few people as a result, this violence first approach doesn’t make it very easy for someone to ally with them, but it does make everybody pretty scared of them, and the growers of avocados have had to form self protection forces in an attempt to fend them off. The second group is, let’s see if I can get this name right, le nueva Samila mitjoacon, the new Mitu akan family. Michoacan is the state where most of the avocados in Mexico come from anyway. They are a relatively new arrival, but they are definitely allied with the Sinaloa Cartel, who are the primary competitors to Jalisco, new generation nationally. The deciding factor about the Sinaloa alliance is significantly different. It’s not that they’re any less violent. They just use violence as a means to an end, rather than just as an ends to themselves. As a result, they have a real fondness for going out and diversifying their operations, basically trying to get into anything that allows them to launder money and agriculture, especially things that are shipped in raw form of the United States, like avocados, fits the bill. So you’ve basically got a group that’s hyper violent and is just looking for cash, versus a group that is a little bit more selective with their violence that even the nicest mass murderers and drug runners you could ever meet,
but they prefer a more corporatist approach that is more what’s the word I’m looking for corrosive to the economy. And these are the two choices that the locals have to deal with, ergo, the self protection forces anyway, you should not expect this to get better, and anytime soon, in fact, you should expect it to get worse. You can make the argument that a few years ago, Americans had the opportunity to quit cocaine and destroy the cartels, but now that they’ve diversified into really any sort of illegal operations, especially if it’s cash heavy, it’s probably too late for that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you should still not take cocaine. That’s at least half of their revenues. But we’re now in a situation where something like a 10th to 15th percent of the Kia there is in Mexico are paying protection money to one of the cartels.
The biggest thing I can underline here is that while I’ve mentioned the two big alliances, remember la familia, there are a lot of local cartels now that are part of these broad umbrellas. And because of that, we now have local groups doing Shakedowns of everyone and everything for every thing. And because of that, it is probably to start looking to North Carolina for your avocados, which definitely means you’re not going to be getting them all year round.