Avocado is on such a winning streak one merchant feels invincible in the face of Donald Trump. Rene Torres says a case of avocados that sold for as little as $13 a few years ago now costs $97.

…Oscar Moherano says he’s worried about what the end of NAFTA would mean to his market.

“The product would drop,” he said. “We’d be producing here with no other place to sell it.”

But these successes don’t tell the full NAFTA story. In fact, for agriculture, it’s been mostly negative. While salaries have gone up in industrial sectors like auto production, traditional farmers have been steamrolled by American competitors.

Margarita Rodriguez Lopez runs an association of farmers at the market. She says specialty products like avocados and papayas have thrived under NAFTA, but there have been sad stories in other sectors.

…Men in cowboy hats overseeing a corn delivery express opinions, discreetly. 

Mexico’s corn producers have been devastated under NAFTA. Imports have surged nearly tenfold from the more productive U.S. As much as manufacturing communities have gained, Mexico’s traditional corn-farming communities have suffered.

“Prices are low,” says a man calling himself Oscar.

A friend next to him says of NAFTA: “It hasn’t helped.”

NAFTA: The view from a mind-bogglingly massive Mexican market | The Chronicle Herald

hmmm

Corry said the government has slashed funds for an agency that protects the tribes, leaving them “defenseless against thousands of invaders — gold miners, ranchers and loggers — who are desperate to steal and ransack their lands.”

“All these tribes should have had their lands properly recognized and protected years ago — the government’s open support for those who want to open up indigenous territories is utterly shameful, and is setting indigenous rights in Brazil back decades.”

According to the New York Times, the government closed five of the 19 bases it uses to monitor uncontacted tribes and prevent incursions by miners and loggers.

Three of the closed bases were in the Javari Valley, home to more uncontacted tribes than anywhere else on Earth.

…Any contact can be contentious and even violent, with the uncontacted usually getting the worst of it because, as Lorenzi told The Post, “it’s usually bows and arrows against guns.”

…Investigations are tough undertakings. The site of the suspected killing, for example, is a 12-hour trek by boat during the dry season. And it involves a group of people with their own language and a centuries-long wariness of outsiders.

Even the details of the killing are sketchy, Lorenzi said. And the vacuum of information speaks to another fear advocates have: that these types of violent interactions happen a lot more frequently than is reported.

Authorities: Gold miners at a bar bragged about slaughtering members of a reclusive Brazilian tribe – The Washington Post

sigh…