Everyone's Selling Charcoal

 El Armadillo for Borderland Beat

I got a call the other day from a friend who runs a business in a northern border town. He's been there long enough to know how things work, what's normal extortion and what's a shift in pattern. He told me they're seeing an increase in forced retail distribution - groups dropping off consumer goods at small shops and demanding payment by week's end whether the product sells or not.

Charcoal one week, fireworks timed to New Year's the next. In some places it's cooking oil or soda. The specific product doesn't seem to matter much.

The model is straightforward. A vehicle pulls up, they unload goods you didn't order, they tell you the price, and they come back in a few days to collect. There's no negotiation. Whether you sell it is irrelevant. You pay the amount they set, or you deal with the consequences.

It’s standard piso with an extra step built on top of it.

What struck me was how absurd it is: when every shop on the block gets the exact same product at the same time, there’s no real market. They’re all trying to sell identical bags of charcoal to the same tiny pool of customers.

The charcoal makes sense from the criminal perspective. It's cheap to source in bulk - likely stolen or extorted from suppliers further up the chain. It doesn't spoil. It's a common household item. And crucially, it's boring enough that a truck full of charcoal doesn't attract law enforcement attention. You can move it openly, in daylight, and blend it into normal commerce.

Fireworks make sense this time of year. But in struggling border towns where most families are barely scraping by, being forced to stock fireworks feels especially arbitrary. 

We're hearing about this from multiple towns now. Different plazas, different groups, but the same playbook. It suggests something about the current state of these organizations, perhaps desperation.

This isn't a new phenomenon. I've heard of cigarettes, beer, tortillas, and chicken all being the product of the month. What we're reporting now is that it appears to be increasing in frequency and diversifying into even lower-value, more arbitrary goods.

From the victims' perspective, it's humiliating and transparent. They're not even pretending this is voluntary commerce. They show up, drop off goods, tell you what you owe, and leave. And you pay, because the alternative isn't worth considering.