“If the government doesn’t back us, we must do what we can”: Mexican Citizens Create Private Forces to Fight Cartels

In the face of kidnappings and
extortion from cartels and a lack of reliable protection from the
police and military, groups of Mexican citizens are taking matters
(and weapons) into their own hands and protecting themselves. In
Antúnez, Mexico, the military’s efforts to restore order – or
really, to restore the primacy of their own authority – by
disarming the vigilantes ended in the deaths of two civilians.
The New York Times
notes:

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.

The Times notes that following the resistance from
citizen in Antúnez, officials appear to have backed down.

Fusion, a new cable network targeting American Latino
millennials who speak English, produced a video report back in
December interviewing several of these vigilantes talking openly
about their peacekeeping efforts. Watch it
here, and note the early statistic that the Mexican police
solve only about 5 percent of reported crimes.

In one of these towns the vigilantes are led by a community
doctor, pushed toward his activism after seeing young girls brought
to him after being kidnapped and raped by cartel members. He took a
dim view of the Army’s efforts, telling Fusion’s reporter, “They
don’t come here to dismantle criminal organizations. Their only
mission is to protect federal roads.”

Mexico has extremely
strict private gun ownership laws, which is why part of the
news coverage seems focused on “disarming” the vigilantes. That the
military is unable to even disarm its own law-abiding citizenry
(other than the gun laws anyway), and that armed citizens appear to
be a better choice to keep cartels at bay (they actually have a
stake in the outcome) may indicate an important shift for Mexicans
in fighting the violence in their country. The New York
Times frets these vigilante leaders may have ties to other
criminal gangs, but there’s little to indicate in either their
story nor Fusion’s that they are victimizing these communities
further or worse than what they had been living under.

A final reminder for people in Austin, Texas, interested in
Mexican drug war reporting: Reason’s documentary, America’s
Longest War, will be screened tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse
Village. Reason’s Jacob Sullum will be there!
More information here.