To fight drug cartels, Mexico transforms former vigilantes

TEPALCATEPEC, Mexico – Mexico’s government on Saturday began demobilizing a vigilante movement of assault-rifle-wielding ranchers and farmers that had succeeded in largely expelling the Knights Templar cartel from the western state of Michoacan when authorities couldn’t.

At a ceremony in the town of Tepalcatepec, where the movement began in February 2013, officials handed out new pistols, rifles and uniforms to 120 self-defense group members who were sworn into a new official rural police force.

“Now we are part of the government. Now we can defend ourselves with weapons in a legal way,” said the movement’s spokesman, Estanislao Beltran, during the ceremony on the grounds of a local rancher’s association.

The government hopes creation of the new rural force will end the Wild West chapter of the self-defense movement, in which civilians built roadblocks and battled cartel members for towns in the rich farming area called the “Tierra Caliente,” or Hot Land.

The nature of the new force is still unclear. But the federal commissioner for Michoacan, Alfredo Castillo, said Saturday it had already been in action Friday evening in a clash with false self-defense groups – even before the swearing-in ceremonies in Tepalcatepec and the town of Buenavista.

Castillo told members of the new rural force they would “have the responsibility of defending your neighbors from delinquency and organized crime.”

The government had found itself in an embarrassing situation: Elected leaders and law enforcement agencies had lost control of the state to the pseudo-religious Knights Templar drug cartel. Efforts to regain control with federal police and military failed. Eventually government forces had to rely on the vigilantes because of their knowledge of where to find the cartel gunmen.

Since the commissioner was named in January, federal forces have arrested or killed three of the main leaders of the Knights Templar. The fourth, Servando “La Tuta” Gomez, is in hiding and rumored to be in the rugged hills outside his hometown of Arteaga.

But the vigilante movement has been plagued by divisions, and its general council dismissed one of the founders, Dr. Jose Manuel Mireles, as its spokesman last week because of an unauthorized video he released directed at President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Another founder, Hipolito Mora, is in jail accused of the murder of two alleged rivals.

Some of the self-defense groups plan to continue as they are, defending their territory without registering their arms. Vigilantes against the demobilization have set up roadblocks in the coastal town of Caleta and other parts of the region near the port of Lazaro Cardenas.

“We don’t want them to come, we don’t recognize them,” vigilante Melquir Sauceda said of the government and the new rural police forces. “Here we can maintain our own security. We don’t need anyone bringing it from outside.”