PART 1
For 4 hours, the tracks of 3 excavators destroyed more than 70 years of history while Doña Mercedes Alvarado was in a medical office in Morelia.
The men who gave the order were convinced that a 72-year-old widow would only cry, accept a few pesos and resign herself to losing everything.
They were wrong about the least indicated woman.
La Esperanza Ranch was located on the outskirts of Uruapan, Michoacán. Mercedes and her husband, Don Ignacio, had spent 46 years taking care of those 40 hectares of fertile land.
Ignacio saw no simple trees. As an agronomist and grafter, he said that each variety was a page in the history of the Mexican countryside.
Its greatest treasure occupied 12 hectares: an orchard of manzanosCreole apple trees, some with centuries-old roots. There grew almost disappeared varieties, such as the ManzanaBlack Apple of Zacatlán, the Rayada de la Sierra and the Menudita de Sidra.
But the jewel was the Roja Alvarado, an apple developed by Ignacio for 30 years. He resisted frost, produced abundant fruit and had an acid and sweet taste that several cider houses looked for as if it were gold.
When Ignacio died of a heart attack, Mercedes was left alone, but not defenseless.
Her husband had left her a safe full of notebooks, photographs, contracts, root maps and certificates that recognized the garden as a living bank of agricultural biodiversity.
Every afternoon, Mercedes walked to the oak by the stream where Ignacio’s ashes rested.
“We’re still here, man,” he was murmuring.
Then appeared Grupo Lomas Doradas, a construction company that had bought 300 hectares around the ranch to raise a luxury fractionation with artificial lake, golf club and country residences.
Mercedes ownership was right in the middle of the project.
First they offered him 48 million pesos. She rejected the proposal.
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