Town protects forest from avocado growers
Regular citizens have taken the fight against illegal logging into their own hands in the pine-covered mountains of western Mexico, where loggers clear entire hillsides for avocado plantations that drain local water supplies and draw drug cartels hungry for extortion money.
In some places, like the Indigenous township of Cheran in Michoacan state, the fight against illegal logging and planting has been so successful it’s as if a line had been drawn across the mountains: avocados and cleared land on one side, pine forest on the other. But it has required a decade-long political revolt in which Cheran’s townspeople declared themselves autonomous and formed their own government.
Other towns, bullied by growers and drug cartel gunmen, struggle on but are often cowed by violence.
David Ramos Guerrero, a member of the self-governing farmers board, says farmers here have agreed on a total ban on commercial avocado orchards, which he contends only bring “violence, bloodshed.”
“People are allowed to have three, four or five, or at most 10 avocado plants to supply food, but commercial planting isn’t allowed,” he said.
The reason is clear. On a patrol, Ramos Guerrero looks out across an almost deforested valley in a neighboring township. Rows of young avocado trees stand in lines up the denuded slopes that once held pine and fir trees.
“This is an island, all around Cheran there has been an invasion of avocados,” he notes.
Anyone who has walked through the cool mountain forest of pine and fir trees in Michoacan knows that the pine canopy protects against heat and evaporation; the thick mat of fallen pine needles acts like a sponge, soaking up and storing humidity; the roots of the pines prevent water and soil from running off the slopes.
But the first thing avocado growers do is dig retaining ponds to water their orchards, draining streams that once were used by people further down the mountain. And then drug cartels extort money from the avocado growers.
“We have realized the only thing avocados do is soak up all the water that our forests produce,” Ramos Guerrero said.
Cheran, which began its experiment in self-rule in 2011 by blocking roads used by illegal loggers, now digs trenches across logging roads with backhoes. As far as avocados, Ramos Guerrero says: “We start in a friendly way, by talking [to farmers]. If we don’t reach an agreement, then we use force, we tear up or cut down the avocado trees.”
If farmers still don’t agree to stop logging or planting avocados, that’s when Cheran’s forestry patrols swing into action.
Riding a pair of pickups through the woods, a community patrol of men armed with AR-15 rifles stop and seize an axe, and then a chainsaw from two men cutting up trees. The men will probably get them back with a caution to seek permission next time. The patrols find already cut pine logs hidden in the brush along the road and seize them, heaving them onto one of the trucks.
Salvador Ávila Magaña, 65, remembers how it was before the Cheran uprising in 2011. He was scared off his land by threats from loggers, who then clear-cut his land.
“The last threat was that if we showed up there [at his land] again, they were going to kidnap us, we were going to be found in bags,” Ávila Magaña said. “Several people were killed and they were found in pieces, burned.”
But even though his 45-acre (18 hectare) plot had been completely logged, Ávila Magaña decided to plant back pine trees, hoping “to leave something for my children or grandchildren,” who he hopes can resume what had once been a sustainable forestry practice of extracting pine resin for turpentine or cosmetics.
“We reached an agreement among the communal farmers that we weren’t going to plant avocados, we were going to only plant trees that produce good oxygen,” he said.
Avocados have been nothing short of a miracle crop for thousands of small farmers in Michoacan. With a few acres of well-tended avocado trees, small landholders can send their kids to college or buy a pickup truck, something no other crop allows them to do.
But because of the immense amount of water they need, the expansion of avocados has come by moving into humid pine forests, rather than disused corn fields.