Mexico: 3 Way Battle: Drug Gangs - Vigilantes - Army

Vigilantes vs Knights Templar

MEXICO CITY — The scenes are incongruous. Inside the heavily guarded colonial state government building in Michoacán on Monday, a solemn lineup of officials vowed that the federal government would restore authority to a region that has descended into lawlessness.

But a couple of hundred miles away, in Michoacán’s agricultural lowlands, pickup trucks filled with armed men calling themselves self-defense forces have been careening down country roads for the past week, advancing on towns encircling the region’s main city, Apatzingán. They have promised to seize the city, the stronghold of the Knights Templar, the state’s powerful drug gang.

Security analysts have said, however, that these self-defense forces themselves are murky and may even include members of other gangs.
 “Tierra Caliente has become a no man’s land full of personal vendettas, serial kidnappings, forced disappearances, and murders that come and go unnoticed, every day,”.

Mr. Bagley said the vigilante groups had emerged to fill the “vacuum or void in which citizen security is so precarious” that any armed group can step in.

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Army vs Vigilantes

MEXICO CITY — Mexican soldiers met fierce resistance on Tuesday as they began disarming vigilante groups that have been fighting drug gangs in the agricultural lowlands of the western state of Michoacán.

In a fluid conflict that is emerging as the first major security test of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s 13-month presidency, the government sent police and army convoys across the western state to restore order in the region, known as the Tierra Caliente, or the hot country.

But as tanks and trucks entered small towns where the vigilantes had taken control in the past few days, soldiers who tried to confiscate weapons found themselves surrounded by shouting townspeople rallying behind the self-defense forces.

Spokesmen for the groups said Tuesday that they would not give up their weapons until the government arrested the top leaders of the Knights Templar, the drug ring that controls parts of the state and that has branched out into extortion and kidnapping.

Self-defense groups said four civilians were killed in the village of Antúnez when soldiers were confronted by a large crowd.   

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Townspeople vs Army

ANTÚNEZ, Mexico — Word spread quickly: The army was coming to disarm the vigilante fighters whom residents viewed as conquering heroes after they swept in and drove out a drug gang that had stolen property, extorted money and threatened to kill them. They even had to leave flowers and other offerings at a shrine to the gang’s messianic leader.

Farmers locked arms with vigilantes to block the dusty two-lane road leading here. The soldiers demanded to be let in; people begged them to leave. Tempers flared, and rocks were thrown. The soldiers fired into the air, and then, residents said, into a crowd. At least two people were killed on Tuesday, officials and residents said.

“He was just a farmer, and now he died for a cause,” one resident, Luis Sánchez, said of Mario Torres, 48, a lime picker who was not part of the vigilante group but was among the two buried on Wednesday as mourners cried out against the government and the soldiers.

As the Rev. Antonio Mendoza, the Roman Catholic priest who presided over the funeral of the two victims here on Wednesday, put it, “the solution is legality and rule-of-law reforms.”

“Until we have them,” he added, “people will take justice into their own hands.”

According to residents, the Knights Templar moved in a couple of years ago, erecting a shrine to its mysterious leader, Nazario Moreno González. The government says that he was killed three years ago and that his followers, who revere him with something approaching religious adoration, have forced people to leave offerings to him. Yet there have been many reports across Michoacán that Mr. Moreno González is still alive. (The Knights Templar are an offshoot of his old gang, La Familia Michoacana.)

Residents told of a long ordeal of terror and helplessness. A landowner was killed when he refused to surrender property. Trucks, money and other valuables ended up with gang leaders and their allies. And death threats became commonplace. The town police, residents said, were bought off or forced to work for the gang.

One of the first things the vigilantes did was destroy the image of Mr. Moreno González in the shrine’s doghouse-size chapel. Residents later replaced it with a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico.
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