In the pine-covered highlands of western Mexico, where loggers clear entire hillsides for avocado plantations that drain local water supplies and attract criminal cartels eager for extortion money, ordinary villagers have taken the fight against illegal logging into their own hands.
The campaign against illegal logging and planting has been so successful in certain locations, such as the Indigenous township of Cheran in Michoacan state, that it’s as if a line has been painted across the mountains: avocados and cleared land on one side, pine forest on the other. However, it took a decade-long political uprising in which Cheran’s citizens declared autonomy and founded their own government.
Other towns, harassed by farmers and drug cartel gunmen, fight back, but are frequently intimidated by violence.
Farmers here, according to David Ramos Guerrero, a member of the self-governing farmers board, have decided on a total prohibition on commercial avocado farms, which he claims only bring “conflict, carnage.”
“People are allowed to have three, four, or five avocado plants to supply food, with a maximum of ten,” he explained.
The rationale is obvious. Ramos Guerrero, on patrol, looks out across a nearly deforested valley in a neighbouring community. Rows of immature avocado trees stand in rows up the denuded slopes that used to be home to pine and fir trees.
“This is an island, and there has been an avocado invasion all around Cheran,” he observes.
Anyone who has walked through Michoacan’s cool mountain forest of pine and fir trees knows that the pine canopy protects against heat and evaporation; the thick mat of fallen pine needles acts like a sponge, absorbing and storing humidity; and the pine roots keep water and soil from running off the slopes.
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