Good morning. It's Monday, Nov. 13. Here's what you need to know to start your day.
When cartel doesn't mean cartel
I'm Paige St. John, joining in from the investigative desk at The Times.
I've reported on the darker side of California cannabis since the state legalized recreational weed in 2016, and unleashed a boom in outlaw cannabis. We published our first investigation in 2017, examining what seemed an unsustainable explosion of illegal small farms run by Hmong growers in the high desert of Siskiyou County.
Cannabis experts said this community would wither, unable to compete with the newly legal market. They were wrong. Satellite imagery shows Siskiyou County now boasts the state's greatest concentration of cannabis, all of it illegal.
From the start, rhetoric diverted frank discussion about the rapidly expanding billion-dollar criminal industry. Law enforcement, lacking resources to identify the leaders of these multi-state operations, reached for a familiar label: "cartel." So, too, did frightened rural residents who found themselves surrounded by illegal greenhouses patrolled by men with guns. Such semantics denigrate the most vulnerable players in this California business, relegating them to the shadows, including a father and son who hoped to send money home and instead lost their lives.
In the criminal world, "cartel" is normally shorthand for Mexican drug syndicates, notoriously violent organizations that put dismembered bodies on public display, and terrify and torment entire towns.
But in Siskiyou County, the cartel was Hmong refugees arriving from Milwaukee. When Chinese growers from Sacramento moved into the valley, they, too, were "cartel."
When reporting took me to the north coast, I encountered Bulgarian growers. They also were "cartel." And throughout California, outlaw cannabis operations that used Mexican laborers were labeled "cartel," even where landowners were white and the grow bosses unknown.
The sheriff of Tulare County in January instantly blamed the massacre of six people (including an infant in arms) on "the cartel," due to the violence, then incrementally dialed back his language as it became known the Goshen massacre was a turf war between Central Valley gangs.
What I did not find were criminal cases that link California cannabis to the violent narco-trafficking cartels of Sinaloa or Michoacan. Rural police lack the ability to even investigate. Siskiyou County's two-man narcotics squad spends a good deal of time bulldozing plants beside the two-man squad in Mendocino County. And in Trinity County. And in Humboldt County.
Yet "cartel cannabis" has become a trigger phrase to decry U.S. immigration policy.
Such language distorts a lot about California's outlaw cannabis industry. For one, it obfuscates the homegrown nature of the state's weed trade, shifting blame for its violence and pervasiveness to an evil external force.
And second, it discounts a very large victim class, its workers.
Cannabis is among the nation's most labor-intensive crops, on par with strawberries. Laborers are low wage and transitory, moving from farm to farm, sleeping next to or sometimes in the greenhouses they tend. They are predominantly minority, drawn from immigrant communities and migrant labor pools. Wage theft is common. And their deaths are untracked.
I analyzed coroner records from the 10 counties willing to provide them, and found 44 cannabis farm deaths over a five-year period. Often, county officials removed identifying information needed to track down next of kin who could describe the lives and goals of these lost workers.
A rare exception was the family of Ulises Ayala, a Mexican shoe salesman who with his teenage son came north in search of work. The father and son wound up on a cannabis farm in Mendocino County, where they were shot, beheaded, and then incinerated on a pile of burning tires, with live chickens thrown into the pyre.
Their killer, a California weed farmer, said his victims were "cartel." And he was certain no one would report their deaths.
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Have a great day, from the Essential California team
Paige St. John, reporter
Laura Blasey, assistant editor
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