People in Mexico are trying to fight back against the power of the evil drug cartels. But even when they finally get sick and tired of the cartels murdering them en masse and they take up arms to fight back, the Mexican government is so corrupt that it sides with the drug dealers.
I’m telling you right now, if you do illegal drugs it is NOT a “victimless crime.” The situation is so bad in Mexico that the little people are taking up arms, but the cartels have so corrupted government that these poor people–literally poor people–are beset by the drug dealers AND the government.
Over the past few years, the vigilantes, a rowdy band of mostly farmers, have captured the imagination of their country. When the Knights Templar took their land, hoping to control the lucrative market for crops such as limes and avocados, the vigilantes piled into beat-up trucks, rumbled across the state’s mountainous Tierra Caliente region and used pistols, rifles and even rakes to take back their farms. The autodefensas helped restore a sense of order to a region that has suffered considerably during Mexico’s brutal drug war, a conflict that’s left an estimated 100,000 or more dead since it began in 2006
Despite the vigilantes’ success against the drug gangs — and some would say because of it — the government had seen enough. The autodefensas were a heavily armed force outside the army’s control, and some feared they could easily morph into yet another cartel. Over the past year, the vigilante groups have fallen apart as the federal government has persuaded some among their ranks to join the police, which critics say was effectively an attempt at a payoff. Those who tried to keep the autodefensas together haven’t been successful either. In late July, Verdía, one of the last vigilante leaders still operating in the area, was arrested by Mexican soldiers in the town of La Placita on charges of theft, illegal arms possession and murder. In early August, a federal court absolved him of the last charge, but he remains in prison. His arrest provoked an angry reaction from supporters in his hometown, who for hours blocked a bridge near the prison, demanding his release. The army arrived, the two sides clashed, and a 12-year old boy was shot and killed in the melee, though it’s unclear who is responsible.
“It was never going to end well” for the vigilantes, says Miguel Ángel Sánchez, a local political commentator. Long-term, “there is really no way of preventing Michoacán…from being a hub for drug trafficking.”
Perhaps so. With the autodefensas now largely defunct, residents of Michoacán say violence has flared again, as new drug gangs have occupied the Tierra Caliente. “First, there was La Familia, then the Knights Templar,” Germán Ramírez, alias “el Toro” (the Bull), the newly appointed leader of Santa Maria Ostula’s vigilantes, says of the cartels. “Now I wouldn’t even be able to tell you which gang controls the area.”
If you do drugs STOP IT NOW! Because YOU are responsible for this.