Mexican vigilantes take over town long plagued by drug cartel
About 400 members of this vigilante group from two neighboring towns organized and swiftly moved into the Tancitaro town hall, forcefully removing the municipal police from their posts and taking over the town’s security role.
According to the AFP, the “self-defense group” had a clash with another armed group believed to be part of an organized crime unit on their way to Tancitaro in a nearby town called Pareo. Two were killed in the fire fight, but investigators have yet to determine which group they belonged to. Additionally, three members of the vigilante group were wounded in the exchange.
These vigilante groups are estimated to now consist of 5,000 armed citizens with various weapons ranging from .22s to AK-47s, most of which were taken from defeated cartel members.
“The government lost control. Organized crime is in control of the state except in the towns that have risen up in arms,” says avocado farmer and vigilante leader Jose Alvarado Robledo, who also asserts that the vigilante groups will not give up control of their seized territories until the authorities “hand over the heads of the four leaders of the Knights Templar.”
In a place notorious for government and police corruption, perhaps the only way to defeat an illegal, armed group is with an illegal, armed group of your own–or so say the people taking part in this movement. They have given all new meaning to the old phrase “fight fire with fire”.
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