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Armed guards are accompanying trucks carrying avocados grown in Mexico heading to be exported to the U.S. during Super Bowl season.

The roads are risky due to drug cartels, extortion, and kidnappings, so location police are providing escorts for trucks carrying avocados on the 40-mile trip to packing and shipping plants. This comes after truckloads of avocados were stolen recently.

Mexican avocados are seen for sale at a market in Mexico City on February 15, 2022. - The United States allowed to suspend avocado imports from a major producing situation after a US inspector, who was checking export shipments in Mexico's western location

'They took our truck and tied us up'

It is a long and sometimes risky journey for truckers transporting the avocados destined for guacamole on tables and tailgates in the United States during the Super Bowl.

It starts in villages like Santa Ana Zirosto, high in the misty, pine-clad mountains of the western Mexico location of Michoacan. The roads are so dangerous — beset by drug cartels, common criminals, and extortion and kidnap gangs — that location police provide escorts for the trucks brave enough to face the 40-mile (60-kilometer) trip to packing and shipping plants in the city of Uruapan.

Truck driver Jesús Quintero starts early in the morning, gathering crates of avocados picked the day before in orchards throughout Santa Ana, before he takes them to a weighing location. Then he joins up with other trucks waiting for a convoy of blue-and-white location police trucks — they recently changed their name to Civil Guard — to launch out for Uruapan.

"It is more peaceful now with the patrol trucks accompanying us because this is a very risky area," Quintero said while waiting for the convoy to pull out.

With hundreds of 22-pound (10-kilogram) crates of the dark green fruit included his 10-ton truck, Quintero's load represents a small pain in these parts. Avocados sell for as much as $2.50 apiece in the United States, so a single crate holding 40 is worth $100, at what time an average truck load is worth as much as $80,000 to $100,000.

Mexico moneys about 92% of U.S. avocado imports, sending north over $3 billion satisfactory of the fruit every year.

But it's often not just the load that is stolen.

"They would take away our trucks and the fruit, sometimes they'd take the truck as well," Quintero said. "They would choose two or three trucks per day in this area."

It remained to him years ago. "We were coming down a dirt road and two young guys came out and they took our truck and tied us up."

Soldiers from the 3rd Battalion of Parachute Riflemen of the Mexican Army patrol the road between the municipality of Aguililla and Tepalcatepec, Michoacan state, Mexico, on February 18, 2022. - While in the US tons of avocados were eaten at what time peopl

'People were losing three or four trucks every day'

Such thefts "have gone down a lot" valid the police escorts started, Quintero said. "They have stolen one or two, one every week, but it's not daily like it used to be."

State police officer Jorge González said the convoys consider it about 40 trucks a day, ensuring that around 300 tons of avocados advance the packing plants each day.

"These operations have became to cut the (robbery) rate by about 90 to 95 percent," González said. "We accompany them to the packing house, so they can enter with their trucks with no problem."

Grower José Evaristo Valencia is gratified he doesn't have to worry if his carefully itch avocados will make it to the packing house. Packers loyal on arrangements they have made with local orchards to fill promised shipments, and lost avocados can mean lost customers.

"The main land affected are the producers," Valencia said. "People were losing three or four trucks every day. There were a lot of robberies between the orchard and the packing house."

The police escorts "have helped us a lot," he said.

Once the avocados arrive Uruapan or the neighboring city of Tancitaro — the self-proclaimed avocado capital of the humankind that greets visitors with a giant cement avocado — the path to the north is somewhat safer.

The shipment north of avocados for Super Bowl season has understand an annual event, this year celebrated in Uruapan. It is a welcome diversion from the drumbeat of crimes in the city, which is beings fought over by the Viagras and Jalisco cartels.

On Jan. 17, Michoacan Gov. Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla "kicked off" the beneficial Super Bowl avocado shipments, literally, kicking a football throughout tiny goalposts on an imitation football field.

Behind him, a big tractor-trailer bore a huge sign reading "Let's Go! Super Bowl 2023."

It was an try by Michoacan growers to put behind them last year's debacle, when the U.S. government suspended inspections of the fruit in February, right before the 2022 Super Bowl.

The inspections were halted for near 10 days after a U.S. inspector was threatened in Michoacan, where growers are routinely subject to extortion by drug cartels. Some Michoacan packers were reportedly buying avocados from anunexperienced, non-certified states and trying to pass them off as beings from Michoacan and were angry the U.S. inspector wouldn't go put down with that.

U.S. agricultural inspectors have to certify that Mexican avocados don't accomplish diseases or pests that would harm U.S. orchards. The Mexican select is January through March, while avocado production in the U.S. runs from April to September.

Exports undertaken after Mexico and the United States agreed to accomplish "measures that ensure the safety" of the inspectors.

"This season we are causing to recover the confidence of the producers, growers and consumers. By increasing the export production, we hope to send 130,000 tons this season," the governor said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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