Did Avocado Cartels Kill the Butterfly King?

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- At midday on Jan. 13, 2020, Homero Gómez González, one of Mexico’s most respected conservationists, attended his final meeting. Like most of his appointments, this one was about butterflies. For years, Gómez had been the leading defender of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a collection of sanctuaries in Michoacán, about a two-hour drive west of Mexico City, that attracts swarms of orange-and-black butterflies migrating south for the winter, some of them the size of a small dinner plate. The migratory phenomenon, recognized by the United Nations as a cultural heritage worthy of protection, draws millions of monarchs from as far as Canada and Alaska and, in pre-pandemic times, some 300,000 tourists.

That day in January, the middle of butterfly season, Gómez was visiting the monarch sanctuary in a village called El Rosario. In most ways, attendees recall the meeting as unremarkable, focused on the sanctuary’s finances, visitors, and tree plantings. If there was one odd thing, they say, it was that Gómez’s phone was buzzing the entire time. They’d seen the butterfly activist, a onetime community president, get lots of calls from tourist agencies, politicians, and journalists. But this barrage seemed relentless. Eventually, Gómez picked up.

Whoever was on the other end of the line seemed to want Gómez to attend the final day of a local fair in the town of El Soldado, according to people who overheard the call, including Miguel Angel Cruz, the current community president. The caller told Gómez the fair was an important local event, noting the horse racing, gambling, alcohol, and many local politicians sure to attend. “Yes, yes, of course I’m going,” Cruz and others heard him reply.

After the meetings finished, Gómez drove the 40 minutes to the fairgrounds, arriving at around 5 p.m., according to his family. He parked his red Seat Ibiza next to a bunch of similar cars in a field near the racetrack. The day was overcast but mild. The grounds sprawled with flapping white tents and hordes of people held back from the sandy track by white metal barriers. Jockeys paraded the paddocks while their horses nickered and snorted. Among the bobbing Stetson hats, jeans, chunky belt buckles, and botas picudas (pointy boots), Gómez wore a white guayabera shirt, grayish suit trousers, and brown shoes. He was 50 years old, chunky, and square-headed, with a thick shoe-brush mustache bristling beneath his ski-jump nose.

Gómez was famous in these circles. Locals beckoned and greeted him wherever he went, attendees say. They included the politician Elizabeth Guzmán Vilchis, who was hosting a lunch for influential local officials. As afternoon crept into evening, the music and the crowd swelled, but Gómez kept schmoozing amicably. “We danced, drank, joked, and laughed,” Guzmán says. “There was no tension between anybody.” She last saw him at 8 p.m., when she took her kids home. Others say they spotted him in one of the tents about an hour later. After that, he was never seen alive again.

The news of Gómez’s disappearance spread quickly. There were articles in the national press, followed by accounts from the BBC, NPR, and the  Washington Post. Experts speculated that whatever had happened to him was tied to his activism.

Rebeca Valencia, Gómez’s wife, had always been ill at ease about her husband’s work. Now she felt paralyzed with fear. In the village of Rincón de San Luis, several miles away from the sanctuary, she stared at her phone. There were no messages, no signs of life.

Valencia, her round face puffy and her eyes brimming with tears, had good reason to worry. The state of Michoacán was rich with international trafficking routes, exploitable pine and fir forests, and the billion-dollar avocado trade. And for the past several years, the state had been caught in a brutal war. On one side was the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Mexico’s fastest-growing criminal organization. On the other, a collection of local groups defending their home territory under the banner of United Cartels. The conflict had become so violent that many politicians and police had stopped fighting and joined forces with the cartels. It was often difficult to separate the mafia from the state.

For people who tried to disrupt this collusion, there were always consequences. “There was plenty of friction between him and powerful people,” says Amado, Gómez’s brother.

Valencia knew her husband frequently had to meet with various bigwigs. He’d often told her they were his friends, but she was skeptical. “They were the type of friends, I thought, who could stab him in the back at any moment,” she says.

Still, when a loved one disappears, generally you have to go to the authorities. Three hours from the sanctuary by car, in the state capital of Morelia, Michoacán’s state prosecutor’s office took up the case. The state attorney assigned police, the national guard, and even anti-kidnapping specialists and sniffer-dog units to hunt for Gómez. Within days, 53 members of the local police force were brought in for questioning. Meanwhile, search parties formed with locals and volunteers, about 1,000 people in total, scouring the surrounding woods and hills for traces of the activist.

His eldest son, Homero Jr., became one of the leaders of these 50-man brigades. Tall, dark-haired, and thick-set like his father, he started searching from as early as 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., when it began to get dark. The work was tiring and desperate. Much of the forest was located at a high altitude. The winter sun stung, and the steep slopes and boggy roads slowed progress. Among the fir trees, the monarchs’ flapping wings whirred like a giant air conditioner.

Homero Jr. had grown up in these woods. He’d spent many mornings in a fog of butterflies filming and uploading videos of his father to promote the butterfly reserve. Now the creatures seemed to speak only to his father’s absence.

Every fall since the mid-1970s, Homero Gómez Gonzalez, the eldest of nine siblings, had watched millions of monarchs migrate to the butterfly sanctuaries near his home. He saw how the insects blanketed thousands of firs like leaves. His grandparents had told him the monarchs were the spirits of their ancestors, returning every year to rest on the Day of the Dead. Gómez respected these myths.

After studying agronomy at Chapingo Autonomous University, he fell into his family’s timber business and started cutting the oyamel firs that carpeted the surrounding hills. By his own accounts, back then he saw the butterflies as a necessary sacrifice. When the Mexican government announced the creation of the nature reserve, he opposed it.

Gómez’s feelings began to change following the decrees of 1980, 1986, and 2000, which officially formed the biosphere reserve under federal protection. The laws forbade local communities from carrying out logging, hunting, or plant gathering. Like many members of the area’s land collectives, Gómez wanted compensation if he was to be deprived of his livelihood. “We were afraid that if we stopped logging, it would send us all into poverty,” he told the Washington Post.

The formation of the reserve would deprive them of their old jobs, but it also brought new opportunities. In the following years, scientists from the U.S. and Europe visited the sanctuary. They taught the locals that in one complete migration, four generations of the monarch were born and died. The butterflies, they said, chose their habitats carefully, seeking shelter in the oyamel firs that populate the cool 10,000-foot elevations of the local mountains. They pollinated many types of wildflowers, formed an important link in the food chain, and took advantage of the umbrella effect of the forest canopy, packing together in clusters on the trees’ branches. Often the newest generation would roost on the same trees, even the same branches, as butterflies from the previous migration. If the locals safeguarded the oyamel firs that populated the area, they could protect one of nature’s most mesmerizing events and attract tourists with money to spend on food, drink, lodging, and all things butterfly-related.

As these ideas percolated in Gómez’s mind, he sensed possibilities. Why couldn’t butterfly tourism be a more sustainable economic idea? The butterflies beautified the land and brought real international acclaim, whereas logging seemed to bring only an ugly vista of tree stumps. Over the following years, Gómez and other like-minded people sought to persuade the government to increase the allowance local farmers received for saving trees. They also tried to persuade local farmers to replant trees on land that had been cleared for crops.

Getting the balance right was tricky. The Rosario, the sanctuary where Gómez worked, operates as an ejido, a piece of communal land to which the community members have rights but the state owns. In the Rosario there were some 280 ejidatarios (locals who had rights to work the land) and about 4,000 more people without land rights. Only the ejidatarios, divided into three groups each working every third year, were allowed to participate in the butterfly tourism industry and share the money from ticket sales, food, and souvenirs. Each received roughly $1,000 to $2,000 during the three-month butterfly season—potentially a big deal in an area where a typical annual income is about $3,600. The remaining 4,000 residents of El Rosario would have to rent the right to operate in the sanctuary as a guide or vendor from an ejidatario or find other work.

Despite the small pool of beneficiaries, these incentives seemed to have a positive impact on the forest. Not only did the local community manage to reforest about 370 acres, but also, according to Cruz, the community president, “now we have no illegal logging in the sanctuary.” Other residents generally agreed the practice had declined, though not to zero.

Gómez’s fight to preserve the forests had been tough, he’d told the international press. He said his work had been endangered by criminals, including illegal loggers and the cartel-infiltrated avocado trade. “Gómez was probably hurting the interests of people illegally logging in the area,” Mayte Cardona, a spokeswoman for the State Human Rights Commission of Michoacán, told journalists shortly after his disappearance.

Throughout Mexico, two dozen environmental activists were killed the year before Gómez disappeared, according to Amnesty International. And Michoacán, his home state, is one of the most violent overall, with 1,309 murders in the first 10 months of 2020. The state contains essential drug-smuggling routes, and in recent years it wasn’t unusual to see rival cartels shooting at each other during the day in the larger cities and towns.

One of the reasons for the gun violence is avocados. From 2001 through 2018, the annual consumption of avocados in the U.S. increased by 5.5 pounds a person, to 7.5 pounds a person. Of those avocados, 87% came from Mexico, and most from Michoacán, whose high rainfall and rich soil have made it the avocado capital of the world. The industry is worth $2.4 billion annually, it pays workers as much as 12 times Mexico’s minimum wage, and it offers high profit margins for local landowners. The money attracts criminals looking for safer alternatives to the drug trade.

The competition for the business in Mexico is fiercer than anywhere else. Four cartels are said to be fighting over avocados in Michoacán, including perhaps the country’s most violent, Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The violence has at times seemed medieval. In August 2019, 19 people were murdered in Uruapan, their body parts exhibited at three different sites around the city.

Much of the avocado trade, and the violence, has been in the central part of the state, a few hundred miles away from the wintering butterflies. Still, tourism fell as many would-be visitors decided not to risk running afoul of the cartels. This, in turn, made a slew of new avocado mini-plantations all the more important to the region.

Days passed after Gómez’s disappearance, and the searches in the fields and the woods turned up nothing. At the same time, police investigations yielded little more than uncertainty. Then Gómez’s car was found parked in El Soldado, a few hundred yards from where he’d attended the horse races the night he disappeared. His tablet and phone were found in the possession of a local councilor’s assistant.

The family knew Gómez never went anywhere without his phone or tablet. In fact, in many of the pictures he posted on his Facebook and Twitter accounts, the tablet would be bulging from one of his coat pockets or his phone would be grasped tightly in hand. So how had they ended up in the hands of a politician’s assistant? More specifically, a personal assistant of a councilor from Zitácuaro, one of the last people to be seen with Gómez and the person who’d been so insistent he attend the races that day?

Gómez wasn’t everyone’s favorite person. He had a reputation for being outspoken and forceful in his political dealings. Such as when he and local farmers stormed the state congress building in Morelia to demand development aid. Or in 2019, when he led a demonstration in the nearby town of Angangueo to demand that local authorities pay to use the water from the mountain springs on the community’s land. Many people say there were tensions between Gómez and local officials. “When the municipality didn’t fulfill a promise it had made to the El Rosario land collective, Homero went down with everyone and fought it,” Guzmán says.

Homero Jr. says gangsters didn’t faze his father much, either. “My dad always lived without fear,” he says. “He would go out on these patrols and capture the loggers. If they didn’t listen, he would threaten to beat them to the ground.” Gómez had a black belt in taekwondo.

Even some local researchers and academics had issues with Gómez. The best interests of tourism boosters, they say, weren’t always precisely aligned with those of the butterflies. On the contrary: Too much foot traffic could prove harmful to the reserve and its inhabitants.

Still, the monarch sanctuary had seemed to help insulate the community from the worst of the region’s violence, and the activist’s disappearance threw that equilibrium into doubt. It had become much harder to know whom to trust. Most residents were hesitant to speak to me. A relative of Gómez’s promised to take me to his grave, but then the next day didn’t show up. The leader of a nearby butterfly sanctuary inside the reserve agreed to meet, then didn’t return my calls. When pushed for answers, most locals feigned ignorance, and others evaded my questions.

Those who did speak to me said that where there had once been tranquility and some economic prosperity, there was now only uncertainty. Although illegal logging seemed to have decreased, the community feared that, in Gómez’s absence, it would pick up again. They also feared further violence resulting from the avocado trade, whose popularity abroad posed an existential threat to the reserve. Without Gómez they were more vulnerable than ever—to corruption and to exploitation by the state’s more nefarious figures. They prayed along with Homero Jr. and his mother, Valencia, that the authorities would find him alive.

But on Jan. 29, 2020, Gómez turned up dead.

A local shepherd found his blue, swollen body floating at the bottom of an irrigation ditch in the corner of an empty field in El Soldado, 200 yards from where he’d last been seen. He was still dressed in his white guayabera shirt and grayish pants. Forensics would later estimate that he’d been dead for about two weeks, the same amount of time he’d been missing, and that the cause of death was asphyxiation and blunt head trauma. They also reported that 9,090 pesos (about $500) had been found on his person. The circumstances were suspicious, yes, but the authorities were reluctant to pronounce his death a murder. Although they stated that they couldn’t rule out any line of inquiry, they seemed to suggest his death was an accident.

Perhaps for the family, this would have been easier to believe—that Gómez, drunk from that night’s festivities, had tripped and fallen down an irrigation ditch. Certainly, it would have made the future seem less threatening. But that irrigation ditch had been searched before. Five days after his father had disappeared, Homero Jr. headed a party that checked precisely that area. “We combed the whole place, and some guys even threw stones into the well to see if there was anything there,” he says. “We found nothing.”

If someone had moved him there later, where had he been beforehand? The ditch where he was found was right next to a house and a farm track—wouldn’t someone have smelled the rotting body? “My father was murdered,” Homero Jr. says.

Two days later another corpse showed up in the sanctuary. It belonged to a 44-year-old tourist guide named Raúl Hernández. He was found with bruises all over his body and a head injury caused by a “sharp object,” according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office. Valencia says the men hadn’t known each other; neither the family nor the authorities could be sure there was a link between the two cases. On this occasion, however, the police were quick to declare Hernández’s death a homicide.

Why had the authorities pronounced his death a murder and not Gómez’s? Both bodies were found in suspicious circumstances, within days of each other, and in one of the most violent parts of the country. The state government promised a thorough investigation. They vowed not to disregard any hypothesis and said they would catch all responsible parties. But Gómez’s tablet and phone being found in the possession of a local councilor’s assistant weren’t mentioned again, and the prosecutor’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.

Today, Gómez’s case is stalling. Valencia, who knows full well where she lives, is skeptical. Michoacán is a place where organized crime and the state exist in some symbiosis. Out of Mexico’s 32 federal entities (31 states plus Mexico City), Michoacán is ranked as the most corrupt as perceived by its own residents, according to a 2019 poll by Mitofsky, a consulting company in Mexico City. Police in Michoacán solve only 3% of the state’s homicide cases. “On the one hand, there may be powerful people stopping the investigation, and on the other, there is a problem of resources and an inability to investigate the case properly,” says Bernardo León Olea, a former Morelia police commissioner.

Sitting in her dark living room staring at her husband’s picture, Valencia says she feels uncertainty and dread. Homero Jr. is studying away from home in Morelia and seems determined to follow in his father’s footsteps. That makes her think, “Will they come for him next?”

Homero Jr. doesn’t seem to share his mother’s concerns, except about the slim possibility that the case will be solved. He does agree that the Rosario community is struggling. The butterflies are in decline across North America, but especially near his home. This past winter alone, climate change and the increased use of herbicides reduced the monarchs’ forest habitat in Mexico by 53%. A mining company is trying to make use of a legal loophole to open a mine near the reserve, further threatening the population. Violent crime is also on the rise across the state, with some avocado farmers arming themselves against the cartels. And, not least, there’s the pandemic. To limit the spread of Covid‑19, the butterfly sanctuary was shut for much of this year’s peak migration season. All this during the first season without Gómez. “We miss him a lot,” Homero Jr. says. “It feels like everything is out of control, and he was the only person who could control it.”

And with no advances in the state’s investigations, Homero Jr. says it’s as though his father has been forgotten: “We’ll never find his murderer.”

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.