In Mexico's 'Hot Land,' Citizens and Criminals May be Gearing Up for More Violence Christopher Woody - Business Insider
go to original December 13, 2016

In February this year, authorities in Michoacan moved to disband self-defense forces that were setting up checkpoints in the state's restive Tierra Caliente, or "Hot Land," region. (El Tiempo)

Self-defense forces, or autodefensas, are not new in Mexico, but a new generation of them has emerged in southwest Mexico in recent years in response to criminal activity and the government's failure to address it. In 2013, tired of dealing with the Knights Templar cartel, residents in Michoacan formed armed groups.

These groups swept up many civilians - from farmers to businessmen - but their ranks were also filled with suspected members of rival drug-trafficking organizations, or DTOs.

"However, these and other transgressions were overlooked given the desperation to deal with the DTO problem at hand," Dudley Althaus and Steven Dudley wrote in a joint Wilson Center-Insight Crime report issued in 2014, adding:

"Their unified goal of ridding themselves of the Knights Templar made for a powerful, although seemingly temporary, alliance. They quickly took control of numerous towns, expelling the Knights Templar from urban areas and forcing local government officials from office."

These self-defense forces made rapid gains, and soon verged into many of the activities pursued by the groups they were fighting.

"All of a sudden, the self-defense forces started to conduct or engage in criminal activities very much like the paramilitaries in Colombia," which cropped up in the 1990s in response to threats to landowners in the 1990s, said Vigil, author of of "Metal Coffins: The Blood Alliance Cartel."

"And they started to see that there was a lot of profit to be made if they started to engage in criminal acts, but what happened also with the self-defense forces, especially in Michoacan," Vigil added, is that criminal groups "started to penetrate them because they looked at them as being a force multiplier that they could use to expand their territory and push rival drug cartels out of the area."

The Mexican government of President Enrique Pena Nieto initially struck a conciliatory stance, sending in federal forces to work with the self-defense forces in Michoacan.

..."All of a sudden you have criminals now working under the auspices of the Mexican government," Vigil says.

Read the rest at Business Insider

Related: Mexican Townsfolk Kidnap Drug Boss' Mom, Demand Loved Ones (The Associated Press)

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