URUAPAN, Mexico _ The cartel members showed up in this verdant stretch of western Mexico armed with automatic weapons and chainsaws.
Soon they were cutting timber day and night, the crash of falling trees echoing throughout the virgin forest. When locals protested, explaining that the area was protected from logging, they were held at gunpoint and ordered to keep quiet.
Stealing wood was just a prelude to a more ambitious plan.
The newcomers, members of a criminal group called the Viagras, were almost certainly clearing the forest to set up a grow operation. They wouldn't be planting marijuana or other crops long favored by Mexican cartels, but something potentially even more profitable: avocados.
More than a dozen criminal groups are battling for control of the avocado trade in and around the city of Uruapan, preying on wealthy orchard owners, the laborers who pick the fruit and the drivers who truck it north to the United States.
"The threat is constant and from all sides," said Jose Maria Ayala Montero, who works for a trade association that formed its own vigilante army to protect growers.
After seizing control of the forest in March, the Viagras announced a tax on residents who owned avocado trees, charging $250 a hectare in "protection fees."
But they had competition. Rivals from the Jalisco New Generation cartel wanted to control the same stretch of land _ and residents were about to get caught in the middle of a vicious fight.
In May, a convoy of pickup trucks loaded with Jalisco fighters raced into the woods and an hourlong gunbattle broke out.
Juan Madrigal Miranda, a 72-year-old professor who runs a small nature center in the area, cowered on the floor of his small cabin as bullets flew overhead.
His fear eventually gave way to anger at the growing power of the criminals, 10 of whom died in the forest that day.
"Around the country, the cartels want land, forest and water," Madrigal said. "Now they are fighting for the keys to life."
