Communities in Michoacan's Tierra Caliente Just Say No to Drug Cartels Tracy Wilkinson - The Los Angeles Times
go to original June 20, 2013

A shrine on the outskirts of Buenavista Tomatlan, Mexico, in the so-called Tierra Caliente (hot land) of Michoacan state, was erected in honor of the leader of the Knights Templar, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, who is said to have been killed in 2010. (No body has been found.) After "self-defense" groups took over and ran the cartel out of town, the shrine was trashed. (Tracy Wilkinson/Los Angeles Times)

COALCOMAN, Mexico — Rafael Garcia slaps the oversize wooden desk where he sits, one of the last mayors still in office in this region of Mexican farm country known as Tierra Caliente — hot land.

Mayors from a couple of the nearest towns fled with their drug-cartel pals, people here say, when locals took up arms against them.

But at Garcia's City Hall, the facade is festooned with hand-lettered signs supporting local gunmen who challenged the cartel, loosely referred to as community "self-defense" guards, comunitarios. Several cities in Tierra Caliente are now patrolled by such groups, whose members, often masked, man checkpoints and pull over passing vehicles for inspection. They have reached a kind of tense coexistence with the army, which moved in a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to bring order.

"There is no government here. There is no state. There is no law," said Garcia, who became mayor in January 2012. "The people finally exploded when they couldn't take it anymore.

"You serve God, or you serve the devil," the mayor said. "Or you just have to leave."

Read the rest at The Los Angeles Times

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