Bernardo Bravo Manríquez, president of the leading citrus growers’ association in the state of Michoacán and a member of Mexico’s most active farm group, the National Front To Save the Mexican Countryside (FNRCM), was assassinated in the morning of Oct. 20.
Bravo and the Apatzingán Valley Citrus Growers which he headed had taken part in the very successful national farmers strike organized by the FNRCM on Oct. 14 to demand that the government adopt policies to save national agriculture, now threatened by international financier speculators and their cartels. The citrus growers caught national (and local!) attention when they threw an estimated two tons of high-quality limes on the streets for people to grab during the strike, informing people that the price growers are being paid for each kilo of limes is far below the cost of producing them.
One national news site, Aristegui News, reporting the assassination, quoted from the statement by his citrus growers’ association, explaining why they had participated in the strike: “to demand the establishment of an agricultural development bank with credit facilities and preferential rates in order to promote the reactivation of the countryside. Water concessions, protection of the production chain and fair prices were also put on the table by the lime growers.” Growers told legislators, they do not want government subsidies, but rather measures that address “the structural causes” of the existential crisis in which the growers now find themselves; “a solid legal framework to protect us from speculation and abuse” is needed. The same article also noted: “As a leader of the sector’s producers, Bravo had denounced the extortions experienced in the sector by organized crime groups and the lack of security conditions for lime growers. In February he reported that he had received threats, and announced the closure of the administrative offices” of his enterprise.
In a brief statement issued the day of Bravo’s assassination, the FNRCM demanded that the government investigate the killing, but it also warned that the government’s “indifference” to the FNRCM’s call for a serious dialogue “creates conditions of vulnerability for the country’s producers,” sending the message that the government will not protect them.
The statement referred specifically to the order given by Secretary of Agriculture Julio Berdegué that two key national FNRCM leaders, Baltazar Valdez Armentía of Sinaloa and Yako Rodríguez of Chihuahua, be excluded from his Oct. 17 meeting with farm leaders from the center of the country—even though the Government Ministry, which had instructed Berdegué to meet with the farmers after the strike, had explicitly approved their participation.
The government should understand that the FNRCM seeks to “build an alliance with the state in order to save the countryside and with it the national economy…. Mexico is under tremendous pressure from the U.S. government and its entities that operate to deepen social polarization and ungovernability in order to ‘justify’ further interventionist actions. In view of this, the government should not continue with divisive and discriminatory gestures against domestic producers,” the FNRCM warned.
