A pacesetter of lime growers within the violent western Mexican state of Michoacan was killed Monday, authorities stated, after repeatedly denouncing in latest months the extortion demands of organized crime on producers.
The Michoacan state prosecutor’s workplace said on social media Monday that the physique of Bernardo Bravo, president of the Apatzingan Valley Citrus Producers Affiliation, was found in his vehicle on a street within the space.
In a number of interviews with Mexico’s Radio Method in late September and earlier this month, Bravo denounced “organized crime’s everlasting industrial hijacking of any industrial exercise.” He stated criminals’ calls for had grow to be out of attain for producers who have been left with no different alternative however to barter with them.
He conceded that the federal authorities had made some advances in opposition to organized crime within the space, however stated extra needed to be finished to finish their impunity.
Final 12 months, the federal authorities sent hundreds of troops to Michoacan to guard lime growers complaining of extortion threats.
In August, greater than half of lime packing warehouses within the lowlands of Michoacan closed briefly after growers and distributors stated that they had acquired calls for from the Los Viagras and different cartels for a minimize of their earnings.
Limes have been a income stream for cartels for years in Mexico.
In 2013, lime growers based and led Mexico’s largest vigilante motion. Cartels on the time had taken management of distribution, manipulating home costs for crops like avocados and limes, telling growers after they may harvest and at what value they might promote their crops.
Mexican gangs and different unlawful actors have additionally focused avocado production.
Cartel extortion in Mexico
Of the assorted felony teams working in Michoacan, a number of have been declared foreign terrorist organizations by the Trump administration, together with United Cartels, the New Michoacan Household and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Cartels in lots of components of Mexico have expanded into kidnapping and extortion to extend their earnings, demanding cash from residents and enterprise homeowners and threatening to kidnap or kill them in the event that they refuse.
In July, Mexico’s authorities stated it dismantled a felony group behind an enormous extortion scheme. The gang, with ties to a significant drug cartel, had operated out of the central State of Mexico, extorting corporations and people in 14 municipalities and controlling labor unions within the building, mining, agriculture and parcel supply industries.
In July 2024, a fisheries business chief who complained of drug cartel extortion and unlawful fishing was shot to death within the northern border state of Baja California. Minerva Pérez was killed simply hours after she complained of widespread competitors from unlawful fishing.
Latin American Summit for Fisheries and Aquaculture Sustainability 
Unusual residents are additionally focused with extortion. In January 2024, a cartel in Michoacan arrange its personal makeshift web antennas and informed locals they needed to pay to make use of its Wi-Fi service or they might be killed, prosecutors stated. Dubbed “narco-antennas” by native media, the cartel’s system concerned web antennas arrange in varied cities constructed with stolen tools.
