How Mexico's Forest People Took on a Cartel - and a U.S. Multinational J. Michael Waller - The Daily Beast
go to original September 26, 2016

Pine resin harvesting is an ecologically sustainable business that provides a livelihood for thousands of rural families. A single tree can produce resin for 80 years, keeping people employed for generations. Forest workers, called tappers, make cuts into the pine tree bark for the resin to drip into small containers - a procedure roughly similar to tapping maple trees for the sap that is boiled to make pancake syrup. The resin is transferred to larger containers, and delivered to community collection points by backpack, mule, or pickup truck. From there, it is sold to distilleries that refine the liquid resin into solid rosin.

Chemical companies buy the rosin as base ingredients for food, soft drinks, cosmetics, household products and industrial adhesives. A byproduct of the distillation process, turpentine, is either sold in its raw form as a solvent, or further refined into household and industrial cleaners and disinfectants.

Companies in Mexico and abroad pay the distillers, and if the distillers pay a fair price to the tappers, they can survive. If they are chiseled or cheated, they cannot.

For years, Efrén Olivares and his ejido, or community, had sold their resin at market rates to the Pinosa refinery in Morelia, the beautiful colonial capital of Michoacán. Now it was with something like a sense of doom that Olivares let the officers escort him to the end of their jurisdiction. They had radioed ahead to their counterparts in Ario to await the load of 40 barrels.

“We knew that the refinery was with the Templarios,” Olivares told The Daily Beast. As he passed through the plant gates, another group of gunmen, armed with AK-47 assault rifles, took control of his truck. “It’s my property now,” said Martín Ornelas Pineda, the plant owner. “If you want to continue working, you’ll have to work with me.” (Ornelas, currently serving a prison term after his arrest on weapons charges, was not available for comment.)

The Ario refinery was well known as one of five in Michoacán under a network called Unored, which Ornelas founded and led, and which multiple sources in Michoacán in sworn statements and in interviews with The Daily Beast, identified with the Knights Templar. Now Unored would receive resin shipments from Olivares’s community for a cut-rate price extorted from the tappers.

People are poor here, and much of the police, legal and judicial system has been corrupted, infiltrated, and sometimes taken over entirely by the cartels. So those who want to end the extortion look for allies where they can. Some have taken the law into their own hands, others have begged foreign corporations they believe buy rosin from the cartels - in this case a specific American multinational corporation - to help them out. In that, they were grievously disappointed.

Read the rest at The Daily Beast

Image: Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast

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