Residents in a Mexican Neighborhood Miss the Cartel That Protected Them Joshua Partlow - The Washington Post
go to original May 30, 2015

Musicians accompany a hearse at a funeral for one of the slain men from Rancho del Sol. (Joshua Partlow/The Washington Post)

At the makeshift shrine for the Warriors of the Five, the young men are listed by their gang handles: Chicken. Nacho. Whitey. In the photos, some have elaborate tattoos, others brandish guns.

Eleven of the men killed by police earlier this month in one of the deadliest clashes of Mexico’s drug war came from the blocks of Infonavit 5, a poor bar-and-brothel neighborhood in this farming town in Jalisco state. The relatives and neighbors who stop to pay tribute don’t dispute that at least some of them may have worked for the New Generation drug cartel. But that label means little here.

They don’t see them as gangsters but as childhood friends who guarded homes, watched parked cars, kept drunks from disrespecting the women. It’s the police, they say, who will take things from the corner store without paying, shake you down on your walk home, make your 12-year-old daughter unbutton her shirt.

“People don’t go out on the street because they’re afraid of the government,” said Graciela Piñeda, whose 21-year-old son, Martin Garcia, was the second of her boys to be killed by authorities in the past three years. “These boys never disrespected anyone. They took care of us.”

The questions of who these men were, and how they died, are at the center of a growing controversy over what happened on May 22 behind the chain link fence of the Rancho del Sol in Michoacan state. In the government version of events, Mexican police, after coming under fire, followed a truck onto the 275-acre property along the four-lane divided highway running between Guadalajara and Morelia. Over the next three hours that morning, backed by helicopters and reinforcements, they battled the gunmen from what National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido described as the country’s “most belligerent cartel,” until 42 of them lay dead. The police lost one man and made three arrests.

Read the rest at The Washington Post

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!