The avocado toast was 2017’s most popular breakfast. Its popularity increased by 50 percent in 2017 and popped up in more than 533,900 Instagram posts (#avotoast being the popular hashtag). Monica Ganley, an expert on Latin American trade and the founder of Quarterra, a consulting firm based in Buenos Aires described avocados as “Nafta’s shining star.”

In London, barely a day goes by when I don’t see one of my colleagues in the office munching on avocado on toast for breakfast and lunch. During my unsuccessful stint as a cafe assistant at Raw Press, customers were hungry for the product. I hurriedly chopped the avocados, cut them in half, and carefully removed their stone, then scooped out the flesh into a bowl. After squeezing in the lemon juice and mashing the green sludge with a fork, this would be smeared on toast and sprinkled with black pepper and chili flakes. In Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury, the avocados stall is regularly and rapidly gobbled up by consumers. The hunger for avocados, not just drugs, is insatiable in the United Kingdom despite the surge in avocado prices.

However, the boom in demand for avocados had a dramatic side-effect of increasing violence in Mexico as cartels, state, and vigilante groups fought for the prize of ‘green gold’. Mexico accounts for forty-five percent of the world’s avocados and Michoacán, where the “War on Drugs” started in December 2006, is the key state which produces ninety-two percent of the country’s total avocado produce. Tancítaro, also rich in strawberries, lemons, and blackberries, is the capital of avocado production in Mexico. “Behind the Instagram-friendly superfood lies a murky world of ecological collapse, drug cartels, and brutal murders,” writes Violet Henderson in Vogue. Mexican transnational criminal organizations including Los Caballeros Templarios and H3 have been involved in the conflict for avocado sparking both bloodshed and illegal logging in avocado's main growing regions of Michoacán alongside trade in opium and crystal meth.

The fight for avocado fused with the wider Mexican Drug War (2006 — present). Avocado Police or CUSEPT, Tancítaro’s public security body, a heavily militarised force, now acts in coordination with vigilantes determined to curb the influence of criminal organizations who have tried to levy heavy taxes on the population and avocado farmers through extortion, kidnap, and intimidation. $1.5 billion was at stake; the value of the avocado export industry. Civilian autodefensa have fought to eject the influence of the cartels from Michoacán with CUSEPT’s paramilitary unit for several years.

The ‘Blood Avocados’ phenomenon illustrates a key point; Mexico’s so-called “War on Drugs” declared by Felipe Calderon in December 2006 and the conflict between the government and cartels is about more than the drug trade, which has become the epicentre of the crime wars gripping Latin America. ‘Drug trafficking is not the sole cause of (the) chain of violence — and maybe not even the most important one.’ writes Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera in Los Zetas Inc, and extreme levels of violence in states such as Chihuahua, the Gulf Coast, Veracruz, Tabasco, Michoacán, Guerrero, Jalisco and Colima are ‘abundant in natural resources’ including oil, natural gas, coal and shale gas. Los Zetas, and other cartels, have also been unafraid to tap into human trafficking and sexual exploitation to fill their coffers.

The UK is not dependent on Mexico for avocado imports. According to Global Food Security in June 2017, the UK relies on imports of avocados from ‘Peru, South Africa, Chile, Israel, and Spain (in that order) accounting for 84% of the avocados brought into the country over the last 5 years.’ However, for dual reasons both environmental and transnational crime, concerns should remain with deforestation, legal and illegal, wrecking Michoacán’s land as trees are cleared at a pace of 2.5 percent per year. This is not an isolated problem. A report by Journal Environmental Research Letters found that ‘drug trafficking was also responsible for up to 30% of annual deforestation in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, turning the biodiverse forest into agricultural land.’ Peru and Chile are water-scarce, despite a surge in mudslides and flooding impacting the countries.

In Michoacán, pesticides are also causing suffering and illness amongst the population with chemicals used in mountain orchards spilling down into groundwater, streams, rivers, and lakes, and subsequently causing illnesses among the population. Alberto Gomez Tagle is an expert on the environment in the Lake Zirahuen region. speaking to The Independent blaming pesticides, “the avocado orchards expanded and all types of pesticides were used.”

Secondly, the concern should be on the collapse of the Mexican state, and the inability of its government to control its territories. This is demonstrated both by the power of organized crime in vast swathes of the country and also by the loss of trust between civilians and the state in an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. The Mexican military has been brutal in its crackdown on narco-traffickers, and insurgents have sowed terror in the rural areas of the countryside, and are frequently accused of being in collusion with criminal organizations and violating human rights with impunity.