It's Vigilantes Versus Assassins Along the Length of Mexico's Heroin Highway Jeremy Kryt - The Daily Beast
go to original May 20, 2015

Along Mexico's Heroin Highway: How the Opiate Gets Into the United States (NBC News)

On an early spring morning, in the desert of Mexico’s southwestern Guerrero state, a half-dozen rusty pickups speed toward a line of late-model 4x4s blocking the road.

As armed men leap from the truck beds, the drivers swing across the tarmac, forming an opposing blockade of ancient Nissans and Ford Rangers.

Crouched behind their respective barricades, their elbows propped on hoods and fenders to steady their aim, some 40 men now draw down on each other with every kind of firearm imaginable: bolt-action hunting rifles, automatic shotguns, old-fashioned six-shooters, Uzis and M16s, even a few AK47s.  

It’s just a few hours after dawn in these jagged foothills; the temperature is already in the mid-80s and climbing fast - but the tempers of the men facing off behind their vehicles are rising even faster.

“Cobardes! Traidores!” shout those enfiladed behind the big-wheeled, showroom-new 4x4s. Cowards! Traitors!

“Cartel assassins!” comes the response in Spanish from the line of old trucks on this forlorn stretch of Interstate 95 - the so-called Heroin Highway, considered so dangerous that the U.S. State Department lists it as off-limits to American citizens.

At least half of all the heroin produced in Mexico comes from Guerrero, much of it traveling southwest along I-95 to the Pacific port of Acapulco, where it’s packaged and shipped north. Mexican state and federal police have so far proven themselves unwilling or unable to challenge cartel supremacy in Guerrero – forcing a growing number of the state’s citizens to fend for themselves.

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