Mexico's Cartel-Fighting Vigilante Forces Get Closer to the Texas Border Ioan Grillo - GlobalPost
go to original July 8, 2014

Armed residents are forming vigilante forces to fight cartels closer and closer to Mexico's US border. (Hector Guerrero/AFP/Getty Images)

HIDALGO, Mexico — The gunmen nabbed watermelon farmer Jesus Manuel Guerrero as he drove from his ranch to buy supplies and held him for five painful days in the trunk of a car.

When family members finally paid a $120,000 ransom and they released him, he was urinating blood.

He’s just one of hundreds of victims of a wave of kidnapping that’s swept this once peaceful farming town, about 130 miles south of Texas.

But almost three years after his brutal abduction, Guerrero, who is now the mayor, says his town has become safer, the kidnappers scared to enter.

This change is not due to the police, he says, but to a clandestine vigilante group known as the Pedro Mendez Column, named after a local general who fought the French in the 19th century.

Read the rest at GlobalPost

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