Sylvia Longmire: Vigilantes Could Presage Wide Social Movement in Mexico Andrew Hiller - The Voice of Russia
go to original January 16, 2014

Members of the citizens' Self-Protection Police take their positions after arriving at Nueva Italia community in Michoacan State, Mexico, on January 12, 2014. The Mexican government deployed hundreds of forces after several attacks on federal policemen in villages of western Michoacan state. (AFP/Enrique Castro)

WASHINGTON – Mexican vigilantes have seized another town from drug cartel in Nueva Italia, and now violence has erupted between the Knights Templar drug cartel and vigilante groups opposing the group.

The movement could be seen growing in Mexico for years in small moments: a member of a drug cartel being beaten or run out of town, for instance. But the current moment has a different quality, according to Sylvia Longmire, a drug cartel expert and the author of Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico's Drug Wars. The vigilantes have taken their towns back and pushed the cartels entirely out.

Longmire thinks there is a chance that these events could spiral into something much more profound and important for the people of Mexico.

"I think it has the potential to build into a major wave. It depends largely on what the outcome of the conflict in Michoacan is. If the violence just gets worse and we end up seeing a lot of dead bodies on the street on both sides of the conflict, (then) perhaps citizens in other towns that are thinking about rising up against the cartels with their own firearms, maybe they'll think twice and say, ‘You know what? Maybe we don't want to subject our neighbors, and our family, and our children to even more violence.’ But if they see some success on the part
of some of these vigilante groups in pushing back against the influence of the cartels, I think there is the potential there for this to be a more widespread phenomenon."

See the original at The Voice of Russia

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