The Making of Mexico’s Vigilantes
How five men from the western Mexican state of Michoacán were driven to take up arms against the Knights Templar cartel.
For three years, beginning in the winter of 2010-2011, the Knights Templar drug cartel has terrorized people living in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. The cartel has extorted payments from the state’s people on everything from the limes and avocados plucked from local orchards to the tortillas at the grocery stores. Those who refuse to pay put themselves and their families at risk of kidnapping, rape, and murder.
The Knights Templar are only the latest in a succession of cartels that has menaced Michoacán and its populace. Attempting to coexist with organized crime has been a part of life here since 2001, when the ultra-violent Zetas moved into the region.
After more than a decade under the thumbs of these various groups, people in the towns of Tepalcatepec, Buenavista, and La Ruana began to resist. Men who grew avocados or worked as physicians took up arms to protect their communities from the Knights Templar. These vigilantes felt that they had no choice but to rise up, as they realized that municipal governments and local police were powerless to—or worse, in the pockets of—the cartel.
Many of the people who joined these so-called self-defense forces have been personally touched by the violent tactics of the cartel. They fight on behalf of sons, brothers, and other family members who have been killed or have disappeared. Others sought to expel the cartels to protect their businesses, which are losing money to the cartel’s extortion payments.
For each individual, the reasons for taking up the fight are different. In the town of Los Reyes in western Michoacán, the Fault Lines team met five members of a local self-defense force. Here are their stories.
The Doctor
As a physician in the farming community of Tepalcatepec in western Michoacán, Jose Manuel Mireles monitored the health of local women during pregnancy. Beginning in 2011, he began to notice a disturbing trend.
“I realized that we had not registered any pregnant women, only girls of 11, 12 years,” he says. In less than one year, he remembers, he saw more than 250 pregnant young girls.
He eventually learned that hitmen associated with the Knights Templar were abducting and raping local girls with the goal of impregnating them. One man told him that the assassins had assaulted both his 11-year-old and 13-year-old daughters, one after the other. Soon others in the community began reporting similar incidents.
“That’s when we decided we had to do something. Because that wasn’t humane,” says Mireles. “I’m a doctor, and I am a humanist. I’ve never killed anyone. But we did have the urge to start the war.”
In early 2013, he and other townspeople approached Tepalcatepec’s livestock association—which has 1,800 registered members, including most of the men in town—looking for others interested in ridding the town of the cartel. Mireles’ father was a member of the association. The Knights Templar had stolen 48 of his cows. Still, he didn’t think it was a good idea to fight.
“He said that he preferred to lose all his cattle. He didn’t want any of us to participate in the fight,” says Mireles. “Well, I disobeyed him.”
Mireles’ friend from the Templars stronghold of Apatzingan sent him a message that the cartel was sending 200 cars to storm his town on the night of February 24, 2013. He told the members of the livestock assembly to be prepared and begged them to keep young men off the patrols. He was surprised that his advice was immediately heeded, as the children of the community headed for their homes.
“It was when I realized my voice was heard, and that’s how I started the movement, by participating directly,” Mireles says. “I wasn’t a leader, I was just a physician of the people.”
The people of Tepalcatepec ended up catching 27 cartel members, and with the help of a Mexican army unit, turned them over to the federal public ministry in Apatzingan. All of the men were free within 48 hours. Regular hostilities then commenced between the self-defense force of Tepalcatepec and the Knights Templar.
By the late-spring, the village began receiving threats that the cartel was coming to burn it to the ground. The self-defense force set up a blockade to control traffic into Tepalcatepec and protect the villagers. Mireles was then the president of the town council of self-defense groups, and he contacted officials with the U.S. government and the U.N. to try to get help for his community.
Five days later, a convoy of 600 Mexican army soldiers and 1,000 federales. But, rather than fight the Templars, Mireles was told they had come to disarm the militia protecting Tepalcatepec. The self-defense forces refused the order, and the army quickly realized they would need to fight, if not in alliance with the vigilantes, in parallel to them.
“All in the self-defense, the cartel killed someone of ours, they took away property, they raped someone. Everyone,” Mireles says. “No one is in the movement for sport or because they like killing people. No one.”
The Avocado Grower
Jose Paco Rangel Valencia has spent more time living in Guadalajara and Chicago then he has in his hometown near the border of Michoacán and its neighbor to the north Jalisco. But, in 2007, he says hecame back to the region once investments he’d made in local avocado orchards started bearing good returns.
In the early months of 2013, as the self-defense movement was beginning in Michoacán, Paco’s brother was shot in the legby the Knights Templar and a few of his orchards were taken over by the cartel. He says he was also kidnapped and made to pay seven million pesos (more than $500,000) for his release.
So he took up arms and formed his own self-defense force. His militia, which includes professional mercenaries, moved west and then north to offer support to other farming villages under attack by the Templars, who have been extorting huge sums from avocado growers to fund their cartel’s activities.
“They fight a lot for the avocado,” says Paco. “They call it ‘green gold.’ Why? Because they would steal a lot of money from the avocado farmers.
That included Paco who says he had to raise the sale price of his avocados to distributors from 40 pesos per kilogram to 48 pesos to make up for the 8 peso tariff that the Templars took for each kilogram he produced. The distributors have loaned Paco 1.5 millions pesos to finance his self-defense force, allowing them to buy the arms needed to face down the cartels. He intends to pay them back in fruit.
“We are doing this from our own hacienda, from our avocados, from our cattle, limes—everything,” he says, adding that he was able to smuggle guns across the border on several trips back home from the U.S. “The people who have cows sell two or three to buy their weapons. That’s how we’ve been arming ourselves.”
Still, Paco insists that the vigilantes would immediately put down their weapons if the feds were able to arrest the three leaders of the Knights Templar: Nazario Moreno (El Chayo), Enrique Plancarte Solís (El Kike), and Servando Gómez Martínez (La Tuta).
In March, a few weeks after Fault Lines spoke to Paco, El Chayo and El Kike were both killed by the Mexican government. So Paco and his comrades may soon be able to disarm.
“I wish this would all be over already,” says Paco. “I have my wife and two sons. I love my family and I would like to be with them.”
The Kid
Fifteen-year-old Francisco Alejandro Gutiérrez Pérez is on a mission to clean up Michoacán.
Last year, Francisco’s family gathered at an event space in the state capital of Morelia to celebrate his cousin’s quinceañera. A Knights Templar convoy pulled up at the party in what Francisco remembers were at least eight trucks. Cartel members stormed the building, beating up attendees. They seized his cousin, dragged her to one of the trucks, and took her away.
“A month goes by, and they still don’t ask for a ransom,” Francisco says. “Then, after a month-and-a-half, they find her in a sports center in Santa Clara inside two bags.”
One bag was near a river, while the other was closer to the facility, which is located about an hour southwest of Morelia. The first sack contained the lower half of Francisco’s cousin’s body. The second contained the top portion.
Francisco says that the Knights Templar likely targeted his cousin because they thought she was sharing information on their activities with the Mexican military or the municipal police. “They accused her of sharing information just because a boyfriend that she had was studying to become a policeman—was only studying,” he says. “They’re people without feelings. The only thing they think about is seeing blood and more blood.”
He volunteered to join a self-defense force in February of 2014. After a short time working a car checkpoint, he was given a .22 and a rifle.
Francisco’s mission has now expanded beyond simply avenging his cousin’s death.
“I don’t plan to quit until the whole of Michoacán is clean,” Francisco says. “When I grow up I have planned never to leave my people behind. I will continue to help in whatever is needed. If the Templars don’t kill me here first.”
The government, he says, did not investigate his cousin’s death. Francisco went into a tailspin of depression, dropping out school, running away from home, and wandering in the hills of Michoacán until he came to a church in Los Reyes. He approached the altar, knelt down, and swore to God that he wouldn’t rest until the person or people who killed his cousin were in jail or dead.
He volunteered to join a self-defense force in February of 2014. After a short time working a car checkpoint, he was given a .22 and a rifle.
Francisco’s mission has now expanded beyond simply avenging his cousin’s death.
“I don’t plan to quit until the whole of Michoacán is clean,” Francisco says. “When I grow up I have planned never to leave my people behind. I will continue to help in whatever is needed. If the Templars don’t kill me here first.”
The Mariachi
In early 2013, the Knights Templar kidnapped Bladimiro Carranza Chavez, taking him to an abandoned farm outside of the town of Los Reyes that they had repurposed into a torture studio. The shopkeeper and mariachi had been abducted while he was helping his daughters with their homework. The cartel members bound his hands and covered his face, but didn’t harm his girls. Bladimiro told his daughters not to tell his wife what had happened.
She would find out the next day when he returned after being severely beaten. Bladimiro says that there were 50 to 100 other detainees being held along with him and more than 100 members of the cartel. He describes horrifying scenes of torture and death that he witnessed while in his brief captivity.
“They had a guy whose skin they’d removed from his face and another guy who they’d done the same to his back,” Bladimiro says. “They had a piece of wood that was bathed in blood, and they had an ax with which they would kill people.”
When he returned to Los Reyes, he abandoned his business. But the Templars weren’t done with his family. Roughly six months later, early on the morning of October 11, 2013, cartel members abducted his two brothers, who worked as ranchers, growing corn, milking cows to make cheese, and raising pigs and sheep.
Bladimiro called the local self-defense force, and when they went to the farm where the Templars committed their atrocities, it was too late. Bladimiro’s brothers were reportedly burned alive in a fire pit with more than 20 other people.
Soon after, Bladimiro traded in his guitar for a gun and joined the self-defense group. ”My intention is not to live this kind of life, nor is it to cause harm to anyone,” he says. “But unfortunately, because of the situation in which we are, well we are doing it. But as soon as it’s possible, as soon as I know what happened with my brothers, I plan to retire.”
The father of six would eventually come face-to-face with the alleged killers of his brothers. He and other militiamen got a tip to a house the Templars were hiding in and, after exchanging fire with the cartel members, forced them to surrender. Bladimiro and his cohorts handed the men over to the federal government. The feds allowed him to inquire as to what had happened to his brothers. The Templars told him exactly what they had done.
“I felt like killing them,” Bladimiro says. But he knows that he can’t. “If I killed a person and went to jail for killing said person, and leave my family unprotected,” he says. “What I care about is my family. That’s what I look after.”
The Blackberry Farmer
When Fault Lines spoke to Israel Alvarez Valencia in mid-March, it had been one-and-a-half months since he had heard from his oldest son.
Self-defense groups had been in Los Reyes, the nearest town to the blackberry orchards Israel’s family owns, recruiting people from the community to join up against the Knights Templar. The cartel took notice and set up a false barricade, impersonating the community defense force. They used the ruse to kidnap 40 to 50 people throughout the region.
Israel believes his son was one of the victims. “We would call him on his cell phone, but nothing.” he says. “The phone was turned off.”
Israel’s wife Estela remembers her oldest of six boys, who was 26, as a good kid who took care of her. “I would ask him to take me places and he would take me, wherever I told him to,” she says. “Or he would say, ‘Let’s go, mom, I’ll take you. I’ll take you to the doctor.’”
Israel and Estela were able to avoid most of the Knights Templar’s attempts at extortion by keeping to themselves. They have 2,000 acres of land where they grow blackberries for export to the U.S. and Europe, and they only came to town to sell their produce every eight days. Their son’s abduction was the first time the cartel had directly impacted their family.
Israel says he resisted arming himself for more than two weeks after his son’s disappearance. He only began carrying a gun at the behest of an army captain. “He said, ‘Grab your guns, if you have them, or, if not, buy some and defend yourself. Because this is a war,’” Israel recalls.
But the only reason he’s armed, Israel claims, is so he can find out what happened to his son, specifically where the Knights Templar took him. He assumes his son is dead. Since joining the self-defense force in Los Reyes, the militia has only detained three hitmen who might have known his whereabouts. None of them did.
“To the person who did it, I’m no murderer. The only thing I want to know is where he remains,” Israel says. “They take me to where he is, and, with that, I’ll calm down then.”
Written by Nikhil Swaminathan, photos from Singeli Agnew reporting for Fault Lines, a weekly documentary series on Al Jazeera. Originally posted on May 3, 2014 on Al Jazeera America.
