On a steamy night, a farmer from a village of modest tin-roofed homes surrounded by rolling lime orchards in western Mexico’s coastal mountains approached Rev. Gilberto Vergara for help.
The drug cartels were extorting him and other growers so heavily that the math no longer worked to harvest all his limes, the burly farmer told him tearfully after Mass. Authorities did nothing, he lamented. Residents were afraid speaking up was a death sentence but staying silent meant starving.
