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Weird

Green Gold: Avocado Delivery Gets Mexican Police Escort

With Mexico's prized cash crop increasingly targeted by criminal networks, local police have begun to provide protection for those delivering them to wholesalers and markets. Prices have risen more than 200% in the past two months.

Green Gold: Avocado Delivery Gets Mexican Police Escort

Avocados piling up

URUAPAN — Avocados have become one of the world's most prized cash crops. The market is booming in particular for producers and distributors across certain regions of Mexico, its country of origin that still accounts for more than 30% of global production. But the agricultural source of pride and wealth for Mexicans has also begun to entice its ever hungry criminals looking to dip into the action.


Police this week in the western state of Michoacán were forced to provide armed escort for a caravan of 14 lorries taking avocados from Santa Ana Zirosto to La Quinta in the district of Uruapan, a drive of a little under an hour. This was to "assure their arrival without any hitches," the Heraldo de México daily reported, citing he Michoacán police authority.

Prices skyrocketing

It was not the first time producers had warranted police protection, the newspaper reported, as rising incidents of robbery and violence targeting supply of the fruit qualified in the region as "green gold."

Earlier this month, the country's ruling party MORENA declared in the Senate that price hikes in limes and avocados were in part for the extortions to which producers were subject, particularly in Guerrero and Michoacán, two adjacent states particularly prone to criminal activity. Senator Ricardo Velásquez told the legislative chamber that in cases criminals imposed produce prices and that typically, growers were forced to pay sums of between 500 and 2,000 pesos ($24 to $98) at all stages of production.

The country's statistics office, Inegi, found avocado prices to have risen 230% between December and January. Last June, some 3,000 avocado farmers armed themselves in Michoacán in response to rising incidents of extortion and criminal intimidation.

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Geopolitics

An End To Venezuela Sanctions? The Lula Factor In Biden's Democratization Gamble

The Biden administration's exploration to lift sanctions on Venezuela, hoping to gently push its regime back on the path of democracy, might have taken its cue from Brazilian President Lula's calls to stop demonizing Venezuela.

Photo of a man driving a motorbike past a wall with a mural depicting former President Hugo Chavez in Caracas, Venezuela

Driving past a Chavez mural in Caracas, Venezuela

Leopoldo Villar Borda

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ — Reports last month that U.S. President Joe Biden's apparent decision to unblock billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets, frozen since 2015 as part of the United States' sanctions on the Venezuelan regime, could be the first of many pieces to fall in a domino effect that could help end the decades-long Venezuelan deadlock.

It may move the next piece — the renewal of conversations in Mexico between the Venezuelan government and opposition — before pushing over other obstacles to elections due in 2024 and to Venezuela's return into the community of American states.

I don't think I'm being naïve in anticipating developments that would lead to a new narrative around Venezuela, very different to the one criticized by Brazil's president, Lula da Silva. He told a regional summit in Brasilia in June that there were prejudices about Venezuela — and I dare say he wasn't entirely wrong, based on the things I hear from a Venezuelan friend who lives in Bogotá but travels frequently home.

My friend insists his country's recent history is not quite as depicted in the foreign press. The price of basic goods found in a food market are much the same as those in Bogotá, he says.

He goes to the theater when he visits Caracas, eats in restaurants and strolls in parks and squares. There are new building works, he says. He uses the Caracas metro and insists its trains and stations are clean — showing me pictures on his cellphone to prove it.

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