Mexican civilians say ENOUGH!

AYUTLA, Mexico (AP) — The young man at the roadside checkpoint wept softly behind the red bandanna that masked his face. At his side was a relic revolver, and his feet were shod in the muddy, broken boots of a farmer.

Haltingly, he told how his cousin's body was found in a mass grave with about 40 other victims of a drug gang. Apparently, the cousin had caught a ride with an off-duty soldier and when gunmen stopped the vehicle, they killed everyone on the car.

"There isn't one of us who hasn't felt the pain ...

Now he has joined hundreds of other men in the southern Mexico state of Guerrero who have taken up arms to defend their villages against drug gangs, a vigilante movement born of frustration at extortion, killings and kidnappings that local police are unable, or unwilling, to stop.

Vigilantes patrol a dozen or more towns in rural Mexico, the unauthorized but often tolerated edge of a growing movement toward armed citizen self-defense squads across the country....


The reach of drug gangs based in Acapulco, about 45 miles (75 kilometers) away, had intensified to the point that they were demanding protection payments from almost anybody with any property: truck and bus drivers, cattle ranchers, store owners. In a region where farmworkers make less than $6 per day, the situation grew intolerable for everyone....

"When they (the drug cartel) extorted money from the rancher, he raised the price of beef, and the store owner raised the price of tortillas," ... ( Sounds like our Government and tax increases to me Italics mine)

An example of the danger came in late July when the city's official police chief was found shot to death on the edge of town....


"Maybe they wanted to intimidate us, but it backfired. They just awakened the people," said one of the older vigilantes, a straw-hatted man without a gun.

Since then, the upstart self-defense movement has spread to other towns and villages such as Las Mesas and El Pericon. On a recent day, Associated Press journalists saw 200 to 300 masked, armed men patrolling, manning checkpoints and moving around in squad-size contingents. Some had only machetes, but most had old single-shot, bolt-action rifles....


The movement so far seems to be well-accepted by local residents fed up with crime that plagued this stretch of mountain highway....

"In less than a month, they have done something that the army and state and federal police haven't been able to do in years," said local resident Lorena Morales Castro, who waited in a line of cars at a checkpoint Friday. "They are our anonymous heroes...."


Community and indigenous rights activists often see citizen patrols as a good alternative or addition to standard rural police forces that are considered corrupt or repressive....

Still, the idea of citizen patrols is spreading in Mexico....

Since 1995, about 80 villages in Guerrero state have organized legal "community police" forces in which poorly armed villagers detain and prosecute people....

He pointed to one incident in 2012 where a judge and a detective in the Guerrero town of San Luis Acatlan arrested a community police leader for exceeding his authority. Villagers responded by arresting the judge, the detective and an assistant....


"When the people are united, it doesn't matter if it's a .22, a 16-gauge shotgun or 20-gauge. It's that when we are united, not even bullets from an AK-47 can defeat us," said the self-defense commander in Las Mesas. "They can't kill us all."

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eye95 said:

You may want to pair the quote down to a F U Q, otherwise you run afoul of copyright laws and site rules.


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