AFP/Mexico City
Under the watch of vigilantes, a pair of captured drug cartel henchmen mop the floors and cook in a dusty, sparsely furnished house in Mexico’s unruly west. The duo once worked as “hawks,” or lookouts, for the cult-like Knights Templar gang that terrorised Michoacan, but they are now in the hands of civilian defence militias that have ousted the cartel from several towns.
The vigilantes, who are marking their one-year anniversary this month, came together to combat a cartel that they accused of murdering, kidnapping and extorting their populations in the lush agricultural state.
The civilian militias now say they want to “rehabilitate” the less-virulent, low-ranking former members of the Knights Templar, because punishing all would be a tall task in a state where the cartel was so entrenched in society.
The two young men held in La Nopalera, a town within the former gang-dominated municipality of Apatzingan, sleep on dirty mattresses in a ramshackle house they share with 10 vigilantes.
“The order is to hold them for three months under my watch and simply convince them psychologically that they have to take the correct path,” said vigilante leader Comandante Patancha. “If they escape, they may not be pardoned,” said the mustachioed man.
If they change their ways, however, they can return home or join the self-defence force, which could earn them $450 a month, close to what they earned with the cartel.
“If the Knights Templar were to catch us, they would kill us,” said Manuel, who gave a fake name for fear of being targeted by his former employers. “Now I don’t have a better option than to help the self-defences,” the married, 25-year-old father-of-two said.
Manuel and his cohort Carlos, who also gave a fake name, say they are much better off with the vigilantes, who feed them and do not tie them up. They even receive weapons training.
When they worked for the cartel, they faced beatings and threats for underperformance. Manuel and Carlos say they were captured by federal police and then handed over to the vigilantes. The federal government has deployed almost 10,000 police and troops to Michoacan in a bid to curb the violence, and last month it struck a deal to legalise the growing vigilante movement.
The government says it has captured more than 300 people linked to organised crime, but the authorities have yet to capture Knights Templar leader Servando “La Tuta” Gomez. Manuel says he joined the cartel because he was not earning enough picking limes in the Tierra Caliente region, Mexico’s lime and avocado heartland. But Carlos admits that, like many of his friends in Apatzingan, he was allured by the gang life, partly because it made it easier to woo women.
