Building a Mini-State With Avocados and Guns

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There is something intoxicatingly utopian about the story of Tancítaro.

This small town has succeeded at self-rule in a part of Mexico — the state of Michoacán, drug war ground zero — where so many similar experiments have failed. It is free of the drug cartels as well as the Mexican police and politicians who are widely seen as part of the problem. It has homegrown institutions. It is safe.

“It’s a nice town. You can walk around at day or night. It’s very nice,” Guillermo Valdés, a former head of Mexico’s national intelligence agency, told us this August. “They take care of themselves.”

Mr. Valdés told us about Tancítaro at the end of a long interview at a Mexico City cafe, where we had met him to discuss towns that were seceding in subtler ways. It was the sort of comment sometimes made after the formal questions have ended and the notebooks have closed, the casual aside that changes the whole story.

He’d recently visited Tancítaro for a book he was writing on the drug war and found its experiment in self-rule intriguing. It’s a global center in avocado production, exporting about $1 million worth every day. The orchard owners use that money to fund militias that guard and police the town.

But the more we heard about Tancítaro, the more that something seemed off. Something Mr. Valdés said stuck with us: “They expelled all the criminals.”

O.K., but how did they separate criminals from innocents? Who did the selection? There’s a version of this that sounds like frontier justice, rough but fair, and there’s a version that resembles towns controlled by drug cartels.

“It’s very hard to believe that Tancítaro is just this island of peace and perfect transparency in Michoacán,” said Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, who studies Central American security issues at Noria Research and has visited the town.

Falko Ernst, his colleague at the think tank, added, “You have an armed group acting on behalf of the real political authority, the grower’s council” — a body of wealthy orchard owners — “doing the cleansing in their name and in their interests.”

The more we learned about Tancítaro, the less utopian it sounded and the more dystopian.

But the truth, or at least what we came to understand of it, wasn’t exactly one or the other. And it wasn’t somewhere in the middle, either. It was, or seemed to be, both utopia and dystopia simultaneously.

Tancítaro is indeed pretty safe. The first evening that Dalia Martínez, a Michoacán-based journalist who worked with us on this article, visited town, there was a big street festival with families out. The streets were, as Mr. Valdés had said, safe, even at night. They were clean.

The avocado orchards were safe as well, guarded by another set of uniformed militias. There was a palpable change at the town’s perimeter, marking the edge of what militiamen called “tierra caliente” — hot ground, meaning cartel territory. The avocado trade appears to be booming.

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But after a few days of scratching beneath the surface, it became clear that Tancítaro had become very good at providing security, but had developed almost none of the other basic functions of a state.

Cinthia Garcia Nieves, a community organizer who moved here to try to help build real institutions, described efforts to build community justice mechanisms and citizen councils. She had hoped that they would turn into something like a justice system and, if not a democratic government, at least a way for citizens to get involved.

But both had stalled, she said; power still rested with the militias. “Authority has become blurred, in a way. So then who gets legitimized? Who is really an authority?”

Her question made us think of very different sorts of places where deep-pocketed landowners had imposed quasi-governance by hiring bands of armed men. Another word for that is a warlord, which we use not as a value judgment but as a definitional matter.

We think of warlords as agents of evil and violence, and often they are, but just as often they are symptoms of state breakdown. Warlords are what happens when state failure, access to natural resources and the safety of a local population overlap.

Mexico is neither a failed state nor close to becoming one. But in some pockets of the country its institutions have broken down enough to reproduce conditions that partly resemble state failure. That includes the area around Tancítaro, which is rich is natural resources. The people who have access to those resources used them to achieve a monopoly on violence, creating enough stability to sustain their access to those resources. They became warlords.

Living under warlords is not the same as living under a state, no matter how many citizen councils you set up. Their rule is, by definition, arbitrary and unaccountable. Because they legitimize their rule through violence, the threat of violence hangs over everything.

But living under warlords is still better, in at least some ways, than living in anarchy, which is a bit closer to describing life in the surrounding areas, where the state is only partly present and criminal gangs fill the void.

There is a famous political science paper — one of Amanda’s favorites, and an inspiration for our coverage of Mexico — called “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” Its author, Charles Tilly, traces how medieval European warlords and racketeers gradually evolved, over several centuries, into today’s modern states.

Variations of this theory are increasingly applied to Afghanistan. Scholars like Dipali Mukhopadhyay of Columbia University and Frances Z. Brown of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argue that Afghan warlords — who provide the closest thing to stable governance in parts of the country — could one day build a state from the bottom up.

But this is a process that takes generations, if it works at all, Ms. Mukhopadhyay told us last year for an article on Afghanistan. It involves a lot of hardship and pain in the meantime. And it worked in medieval Europe in part because nascent states could develop for centuries, relatively unchallenged.

What can make this harder, Ms. Mukhopadhyay pointed out, is when there is still just enough of a central state to oppose these warlord-driven movements in organic state building. That’s been happening for years in Afghanistan, where the United States sometimes pushes the central government to challenge warlords for authority, and other years pushes the government to tolerate them.

It seems likely that that will be Michoacán’s future as well. The government is plenty strong enough to reassert authority over Tancítaro, much as it did a few years ago in less functional militia-run areas of the state.

The government has declined to do so, Mr. Ernst suggested, for fear that disturbing Tancítaro’s safety and avocado revenue would be too politically risky. But that calculus could always change.

Tancítaro is, for us, a microcosm of a problem that is manifesting around much of the world today, driving many of its worst crises: pockets of warlordism within a functional state. Those warlords help the state by providing local stability, but they also implicitly challenge its authority.

The state and the warlord can develop an accord that will allow the warlord to one day incorporate his or her territory into the state. Or, far more common, they can compete for control, often leading to violence. This opens space for organized crime — mafias that often now have global reach — and inhibits countries from coalescing into unified states.

And it’s much more common than you might think, playing out in chunks of Central America and Southeast Asia, in gang-controlled neighborhoods of major South American cities, and in much of the Middle East. Sometimes it does work out, as it might be in parts of West Africa and the former Yugoslavia where warlords are increasingly joining the state, though this peacemaking can come at terrible cost.

We hope you find this dynamic as fascinating as we do, because we’re hoping to cover it more over the coming year.

Ms. Nieves said she hoped that Tancítaro’s experiment could congeal into something stabler and more responsive. Still, she said, she worried about whether its ad hoc, informal practices could ever function in the absence of real institutions. That is also Ms. Mukhopadhyay’s concern for Afghanistan, and ours for so many place we’ve covered. But it can be hard to find a better way.