In the roiling Mexican state of Michoacan, where much of the nation’s
illicit and million-dollar meth trade is based, all-out war is raging in
broad daylight.
Outlaws from the exceptionally nasty and cult-like cartel Knights
Templar launch blazing gunfights in city streets against thousands of
federal troops dispatched by President Enrique Pena Nieto, making the
humble state one of the most dangerous in Mexico.
No one knows how many villagers and soldiers have been killed, but on
any given weekend of late, local media have reported numbers as high as
50 in a single town.
Among the dead are high-profile politicians and military leaders: state
legislator Osbaldo Esquivel Lucatero was hacked to death on the side of
a road last week as he gave an interview to a journalist in the lawless
territory; Navy Vice Adm. Carlos Miguel Salazar, one of the country's
highest-ranking naval officers, was shot to death in a recent ambush
that also killed his bodyguard.
Stratfor
This map, courtesy of global
intelligence firm Stratfor, shows areas in Mexico influenced by drug
syndicates. Knights Templar, which controls Michoacan on the central
Pacific coast, is the offspring of the notorious La Familia
organization.
Now armed civilian militias have stepped into the fray, saying they’ll
protect themselves, thank you very much, from organized crime thugs
who've robbed, raped and terrorized villagers who had the temerity to
try to go about daily life in a rural state that appears to have
disintegrated into wanton anarchy.
The number of civilian fighting groups has grown to about 30 units that
have secured about a dozen towns in the past seven months including La
Ruana and the lowland enclave of Tepalcatepec.
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"I know I'm going to die," a Mexican civilian fighter told the Daily News. "I'm not afraid of that.”
Alexandre Meneghini/AP
Mexican soldiers patrol rural
roads in Holanda in Michoacan state, Mexico, where organized crime
syndicate Knights Templar operate the country’s biggest meth-smuggling
operation as well as gun down, extort, rape and kidnap villagers while
waging open warfare with military troops.
He spoke with The News via a mobile phone from the town of La Ruana. He
asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisal from the Knights
Templar, whose founding members announced their 2006 arrival into cartel
life by rolling five severed heads into a Michoacan disco.
“We had to do something. We were dying,” said the member of
Por Un Michoacan Con Libertad
(For a Free Michoacan), a self-defense group that started standing up
to the Knights Templar and its extortion racket that charged "fees" to
poor farmers for everything from picking limes to having children.
Their numbers have dwindled from 300 to 200, he said, because militia
members fearing for their lives fled with their families to Tijuana,
where they are seeking asylum in the U.S. Twenty-five civilian soldiers
have been killed, he said.
Their desperate rebellion mirrors the increasingly vicious cartel,
which controls nearly all of the verdant valleys and lush mountains of
Michoacan, population 4.4 million and dropping daily as residents flee.
Balacerasmex via YouTube
Wearing flack vests and
toting automatic weapons, self-proclaimed cartel fighters in Mexico’s
central Michoacan state set up check points and take on members of the
Knights Templar in a deafening gun battle footage posted Sept. 10 on
YouTube.
The Knights Templar takes its name from the Templar Knights, the medieval Roman Catholic warriors.
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“They used to come in big trucks, knocking on doors, saying, ‘I’m
taking your wife now. I’ll be back in an hour,'" said the civilian
fighter.
"'When I come back I’m taking your daughter for a few days, a few weeks. Make sure she has a shower,'” he recounted.
Gustavo Aguado/AP
An armed civilian stands
guard in the small town of Aquila in Michoacan state, as soldiers in
gun-mounted trucks rumble by. Villagers, fed up with military
corruption and drug cartel terrorism, have taken the law into their own
hands.
“There have been girls 12, 13, 14, 15 that came back pregnant,” he said.
Mass graves and decapitated bodies along roads and in forests are
routine sights, warnings from the cartel to give in and shut up.
The all-male militias don’t trust the long-corrupt military or its 6,000 soldiers living in their midst.
And the military, as well as the government, doesn't trust the
self-defense groups, saying they are paramilitary organizations that
often do the bidding of drug syndicates.
STRINGER/MEXICO/REUTERS
The grisly scene earlier this
year when the bodies of seven men were found in lawn chairs in a
roundabout in the middle of Uruapan, Michoacan state, where Mexican drug
cartel Knights Templar runs virtually the entire region. 'Warning, this
is going to happen to all muggers, pickpockets, thieves of cars, homes
and pedestrians, kidnappers, rapists and extortionists,' read the sign
impaled with an ice pick into one victim’s chest.
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Interior Minister Miguel Angelo Osorio Chong has criticized the
militias, saying troops deployed to the area are more than enough to
protect residents.
"The army is there. They asked for security and protection, and they
have it. There is no justification to walk around armed," he told a
Mexican radio station last month.
The government has reason to suspect cartels are aligned with some of
the self-defense groups, Christoper Wilson of the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, a Washington-based think tank, told
The News.
Balacerasmex via YouTube
In a horrific video posted
this month on YouTube, vigilantes in Michoacan unload scores of rounds
from assault rifles during daylight shootout against Knights Templar
cartel gunmen.
"There are organized (crime) groups financing these self-defense
groups," he said. "One of the clear signs is that some of these groups
have a level of financing and high firepower that would be hard to come
by from somewhere else" he said.
Not true, said militia members who spoke to The News.
The groups’ defiance started last year with middle-of-the-night raids of cartel encampments outside their villages.
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Marco Ugarte/AP
A 22-page booklet titled 'The
Code of the Knights Templar of Michoacan,' is displayed in Morelia,
Mexico. The drug cartel, named after the medieval Roman Catholic order
of religious warriors, clandestinely distributed the booklets through
Michoacan state. Inside, it says the crime syndicate 'will begin a
challenging ideological battle to defend the values of a society based
on ethics.'
Residents picked up weapons they had at home — machetes and small-caliber pistols.
Rousted from sleep at 2 or 3 a.m., the cartel members — many of them
inexperienced recruits dispatched to the hinterlands — simply ran,
leaving behind their assault rifles and handheld radios.
“All the weapons we have are their weapons,” the militiaman in La Ruana said.
Dr. Jose Manuel Mireles, a physician who once worked in California, now
serves as a coordinator for self-defense groups in Tepalcatepec.
Alexandre Meneghini/AP
A Knights Templar patrol
vehicle, damaged in a grenade attack, is confiscated by police in
Apatzingan in Michoacan state, Mexico. The drug syndicate patrols roads,
demanding toll fees from villagers, and extorts ‘fines’ from poor
farmers and business owners.
In an interview with The News, the doctor said his town is keeping the
cartel at bay with round-the-clock patrols. But their fears of reprisal
are constant.
“We are vigilant 24 hours a day,” he said. “We have to defend ourselves
and we are prepared. We have lost some good people. The cartel tries to
get back in every day. They send more and more to try and fight us.”
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Listening to cartel radio traffic tells the villagers they are far from being home free.
Marco Ugarte/AP
A 'self-defense' villager
emerges from a roadside chapel established by the Knights Templar. The
crime syndicate built the public shrines so villagers could pray to the
cartel’s 'St. Nazario,' aka Nazario Moreno, the venerated saint of drug
traffickers. He is believed to have been killed in a 2010 gunbattle with
police in Michoacan.
“We hear them every day, on the radios we’ve stolen from them, saying
they’re going to come up here and kill everything down to the dogs and
cats," Mireles said.
"But we are not going to permit that, ever,” he added.
Where cartel members are camped out is no secret, the La Ruana fighter said.
“Everybody knows where the leaders are, but the soldiers don’t go
there,” he said. “We tell them where they are. I ask them why they don’t
go. They say their orders are to stay here and to protect the town.”
The Knights Templar spun off from the dreaded La Familia cartel in
2011, after infamous drug lord Nazario Moreno, aka “El Mas Loco” (The
Craziest One), reportedly died in a shootout with federal police. His
body has never been found and Moreno is now considered the patron saint
of drug traffickers.
The cult-like crime syndicate has its own code of conduct book, which
it distributes across the region where members grow massive crops of
marijuana and heroin poppies and control an incredibly large and
lucrative meth industry.
All of those products travel north into the U.S., where 90% of illegal
drugs emanate from Mexico, according to FBI statistics. Cartels reap
untold billions and the Knights Templar is no exception.
In its professionally printed code of conduct booklet, members are
lauded as fighters "against materialism, injustice and tyranny in the
world.”
With Ginger Adams Otis and
News Wire Services.
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