Mexican community takes fight to drug cartels

MCT Information Services Coalcoman/MexicoRafael Garcia slaps the oversize wooden desk where he sits, one of the last mayors still in office in this region of Mexican farm country known as Tierra Caliente - hot land.Mayors from a couple of the nearest towns fled with their drug-cartel pals, people here say, when locals took up arms against them.But at Garcia’s City Hall, the facade is festooned with hand-lettered signs supporting local gunmen who challenged the cartel, loosely referred to as community “self-defence” guards, comunitarios.Several cities in Tierra Caliente are now patrolled by such groups, whose members, often masked, man checkpoints and pull over passing vehicles for inspection. They have reached a kind of tense co-existence with the army, which moved in a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to bring order.“There is no government here. There is no state. There is no law,” said Garcia, who became mayor in January 2012. “The people finally exploded when they couldn’t take it anymore.”This western-most section of Michoacan state is experiencing a rare phenomenon in Mexico: Communities have risen up against the drug-trafficking gangs that terrorised them for years. And although questions remain over who exactly is behind all of it, the developments are posing a challenge to President Enrique Pena Nieto, who must confront the possibility of widespread vigilantism, possibly even outbreaks of civil war.His decision to send in the army last month was the first major military operation against traffickers in his six-month-old administration.Locals had tolerated cartel henchmen for years - and often collaborated with them - but increasingly, the bad guys harassed the public.First there was the steady stream of extortion as the cartel, which took the name Knights Templar (“Caballeros Templarios”) after the Middle Ages crusaders, gained a stranglehold on the economy throughout Michoacan, one of the most bountiful agricultural states in Mexico.The Templarios dictated whom cattlemen could sell their stock to, then insisted on a 10% cut.Same with lumber. Lime pickers, tortilla vendors and everyone else had to pay a fee to the cartel. Homeowners had to pay 1,000 pesos, about $80, per square yard of their houses.Refusal meant your business or residence might be burned down. Ten lime pickers who resisted were slaughtered, their bodies dumped on the side of a road, in mid-April. Garcia said he had to pay 10% of his municipal budget to the Templarios as protection money.Then, they began raping women, often the wives or daughters of prominent residents. “That’s when it became a matter of dignity,” Garcia said.“They see a house. A car. A woman,” said Misael Gonzalez, a timber man who heads the community guards in Coalcoman. “They wanted it, they took it.”For years, this region of avocado and methamphetamine was home to a cult-like cartel called La Familia. Then-president Felipe Calderon first sent the military after the outlaw group in late 2006, the start of what would become a nationwide drug-war offensive. If anything, La Familia just got stronger and eventually morphed into the larger and more insidious Knights Templar.