collapsedsquid:

Local orchard owners, who export over $1 million in avocados per day, mostly to the United States, underwrite what has effectively become an independent city-state. Self-policing and self-governing, it is a sanctuary from drug cartels as well as from the Mexican state.

But beneath the calm is a town under tightfisted control, enforced by militias accountable only to their paymasters. Drug addiction and suicide are soaring, locals say, as the social contract strains.

Tancítaro represents a quiet but telling trend in Mexico, where a handful of towns and cities are effectively seceding, partly or in whole. These are acts of desperation, revealing the degree to which Mexico’s police and politicians are seen as part of the threat.

Interesting to anyone wondering about secession and private police.

Ah I was gonna reblog this, I’m working on some things tangential. But yeah, this far more than a “SHTF->things rebuilt from a basis of armed family units on up” is a reasonable model of how a centralized state gives way to local power structures.

More than anything, the latest Republican budget is a parafeudal one, favoring propertyholders. After all that’s the base of conservatism - people whose resources are tied up in immovable property. Land and resource magnates on the top down to landlords, factory owners, car dealers at the local level. Without an option of Exit and more vulnerable to local policy, doubling down on Voice.

Relatively less conservative Rockefeller Republicanism was an upper-class coalition but one relying on professionals with their portable skills and banking with its liquid capital, while the “movement” conservatism that displaced it was powered by Western resource extraction and development interests.

And hell as is Dan Gilbert’s essentially become the Baron of Detroit (possibly because it was a softer target than his previous fief-aspirant of Cleveland?), in a project that involved hiring his own downtown security forces (in another ‘80s-cyberpunk-come-at-last bit, that’s literally the premise of RoboCop).

I read an article a few months ago, kind of “a ray of sunshine in the rust belt”, it was about a lady who started out buying and renovating college town rentals, moved up into contracting, then into construction equipment rental, and after the 2008 boom found she was the only one in the depressed region with surplus capital, bought up everything and is trying to single-handedly develop it. I think there was something about an industrial building being used as a tech center with the standout company making apps for filing airline flight reports?

Anyway yeah, that’s the kind of thing I’d have my eye on.