MEXICO CITY — Vigilante attacks and mob justice appeared to be on the rise in Mexico this week as violence mounted, more than two dozen bodies appeared along roadsides and the government ruled out any new crackdown on criminal gangs.
Prosecutors
in the northern state of Sinaloa said Thursday five young men have been
murdered in recent days, and in all five cases toy cars were carefully placed
atop their corpses. The men were apparently car thieves, and the toys indicated
both the reason they were killed and served as a warning to other thieves.
The
latest such murder came Wednesday. Prosecutors said the victim had been
identified as the same man seen on security camera footage earlier that day
stealing a pickup truck at gunpoint from a woman outside her home in the state
capital, Culiacan.
That
same day, a total of seven suspected kidnappers were killed by townspeople in
the largest mass lynching in recent memory in the central state of Puebla. Some
were beaten, some hanged.
The
National Human Rights Commission said 43 people have been killed in lynchings
so far this year, and 173 injured. That was up from the already-record year for
mob justice in 2018.
“Those
who take justice into their own hands commit acts of barbarism, not justice,”
the commission said.
Vigilantes
say they have to act because authorities won’t crack down on criminal gangs,
which have become more brazen and have begun returning to the grisly mass
executions that marked Mexico’s 2006-2012 drug war.
On
Thursday, the notoriously violent Jalisco cartel killed 19 people whose bodies
— in some cases dismembered — were left hanging from an overpass and strewn
along a highway in the western state of Michoacan. Another set of four
dismembered bodies were found in plastic garbage bags the same day on a highway
in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, and a few hours later, five more bodies
were found wrapped in garbage bags elsewhere in the state.
It was
in Michoacan that Mexico’s last big anti-gang offensive was launched in 2006;
and it was also in Michoacan where the country’s biggest vigilante movement was
started in 2013. Back then, farmers and ranchers rose up in arms to drive the
Caballeros Templarios drug cartel out of the state with the help of the army
and federal police.
Elements
of those government forces have now been merged into the National Guard, a
force that, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been loath to
confront residents and criminals, in part because López Obrador discourages the
use of force.
In July,
villagers protecting fuel thieves in Puebla shoved aside armed National Guard
forces and burned two of their patrol vehicles. In May, an armed gang in
Michoacan abducted five soldiers to demand their army unit return illegal
weapons soldiers had seized from the gang. López Obrador later personally
congratulated the unit for avoiding violence.
Hipólito
Mora, one of the founders of the 2013 Michoacan vigilante movement, said such
tactics appear unlikely to work against violent, heavily armed cartels.
“The
authorities should give the armed forces more leeway, not limit them, not allow
organized crime gangs to throw stones at them and burn their vehicles,” said
Mora, who now has returned to working his lime orchards but still has the
weapons he used in the vigilante movement.
“They
(the cartels) grow when they are not stopped and the armed forces don’t defend
themselves,” Mora said. “They say, ‘We can do whatever we want.’”
But
López Obrador said Friday he won’t be drawn into the kind of army offensive
that then-President Felipe Calderon launched against the cartels in 2006, when
he sent troops to Michoacan. Over 100,000 homicides occurred in the next
several years.
“We are
not going to fall into the trap of declaring war like they did before,” López
Obrador. “That is what led us to this situation of crime and violence.”
Instead,
the president vowed to continue with programs to give youths jobs, training and
education programs so they won’t be recruited by drug cartels.
“We are
going to continue treating the root causes of the violence,” he said. “Peace
and tranquility are the products of justice, and that may take time, but it is
the best strategy.”
López
Obrador said he’s well aware of the historical parallels.
“It was
precisely there, in Michoacan, where they declared war on drug trafficking, and
they kicked a hornets’ nest, and that caused a lot of suffering and damage for the
people of Mexico.”
Mexico
is still grappling with the lingering tragedy of the last drug war: the search
for over 40,000 people who disappeared, never to be seen again. Relatives and
activists have taken up the search themselves, digging in clandestine grave
sites used by drug and kidnapping gangs.
On
Thursday, activists declared they had closed the largest, longest such
excavation carried out to date, a total of 156 burial pits excavated over three
years that contained at least 298 bodies and thousands of bone fragments.
Relatives
expressed certainty that no bodies remained in the vast burial field known as
Colinas de Santa Fe in Veracruz state.
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