On 5 August the United States Department of Agriculture suspended inspections of avocados from Michoacán, and the US Embassy pulled government personnel out of the state after issuing a security alert. Inspections are required for export. Without them, the trade stops.

The suspension lasted days. What it triggered is still unfolding, and according to the conflict monitor ACLED it is likely to move violence rather than end it.

What is being extorted, and how

Criminal rent extraction from avocado producers means imposing payments on farmers, packers and transporters and threatening violence to enforce them. Payments are typically calculated per cultivated hectare or per exported kilogram. Groups in the state have also been linked to land grabs and illegal deforestation to establish new groves.

The reason agriculture is targeted is structural rather than symbolic. Rural communities are isolated and hard for security forces to reach; they rely on cash because banking access is limited; and harvests and shipments are visible, predictable and move along unguarded secondary roads. Extortion of farming is low-risk, high-frequency income.

The sums involved explain the intensity. Mexico sold $3.65 billion of avocados to the United States in 2025, and supplies around 80 per cent of American imports. Cultivation supports roughly 200,000 jobs in Michoacán alone. Exports rose 34 per cent year-on-year in the first half of 2026.

The response

Mexico deployed 1,557 federal troops to Michoacán after the suspension, part of a wider presence that the defence secretary put at 8,000 soldiers in the state plus 1,500 personnel dedicated specifically to the avocado sector. Federal authorities arrested twelve people in Uruapan and Ziracuaretiro on eleven simultaneous search warrants, among them a man identified as a member of a Knights Templar cell. Another arrest, of a local cartel leader operating around Los Reyes, preceded the American suspension and appears to have prompted the security alert.

Inspections resumed on 13 August. The security secretary said the state’s Plan for Peace and Justice had produced 950 arrests. Michoacán remains under the United States’ most restrictive travel advisory.

The displacement problem

ACLED’s assessment is that concentrating security around the avocado industry will push criminal groups to adapt their tactics and shift where they operate — and that the state’s own data already shows movement.

Violence around lime production in Tierra Caliente, particularly Apatzingán, Buenavista and Parácuaro, quadrupled between 2022 and 2023 and has stayed high since. Extraction from avocado growers then drove a spread of violence across Cotija, Erongarícuaro, Madero, Tacámbaro, Tingambato, Tingüindín and Turicato through 2025 and the first half of 2026. ACLED records a further uptick this year in Turicato, Tacámbaro, Salvador Escalante, Pátzcuaro and Erongarícuaro.

There is also a change in method worth noting: groups are relying more on remote violence to hold territory, including improvised landmines, which puts rural workers rather than rivals at the greatest risk.

The argument about whether this works

The Mexican government’s position is that extortion networks are being dismantled and that arrests, not troop numbers, are the measure. Nine hundred and fifty is a substantial figure.

Analysts who study Mexican organised crime tend to make a different point, and it is not that the operations fail. It is that protecting one commodity in one set of municipalities protects that commodity, and that revenue extraction moves to whatever is next — livestock, meat, transport, or the same crop in a neighbouring valley. The National Strategy against Extortion under which these arrests were made covers agricultural, livestock and meat sectors together, which suggests the authorities are aware of the pattern.

Two people whose killings made Michoacán a federal priority last November illustrate what is at stake: Uruapan’s mayor Carlos Manzo and the citrus growers’ leader Bernardo Bravo, both of whom had publicly denounced extortion before they were killed.

Sources

Violence data and municipal breakdown from ACLED; suspension and resumption of inspections via NBC News and UPI; arrests and deployment figures reported by Mexico’s Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection; extortion mechanics via Southern Pulse.