Vigilante Ranchers, Fruit Growers Kick Out Brutal Drug Cartel in Western Mexico Katherine Corcoran - Associated Press
go to original November 9, 2013

Armed men from to a self-defense group create a checkpoint in the town of Las Colonias, Mexico. Several communities have created their own self-defense groups after a pseudo-religious cartel, known as the "Knights Templar," has for years demanded protection payments from cattlemen, lime growers and other businesses. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP)

TEPALCATEPEC, Mexico — For lime grower Hipolito Mora, it was time to organize and pick up arms when a packing company controlled by a brutal drug cartel refused to buy his fruit. For Bishop Miguel Patino Velazquez, it was seeing civilians forced to fight back with their own guns that made him speak out. For Leticia, a lime picker too afraid of retribution to give her last name, it was the day she saw a taxi driver kidnapped in front of his two young children that convinced her to join those taking the law into their own hands.

In Mexico they call it "the drop that makes the glass overflow," and it came at different points for the people living for years in fear of the brutal Knights Templar in the western Valley of Apatzingan, an emerald green tapestry of orchards bordered by blue-gray peaks.

"We lived in bondage, threatened by organized crime," said Leticia, 40, who ekes out a living picking fruit and selling chicken on the side. "They wanted to treat people like animals."

Eight months after locals formed self-defense groups, they say they are free of the cartel in six municipalities of the Tierra Caliente, or "Hot Land," which earned its moniker for the scorching weather but whose name has also come to signify criminal activity. What's more, the self-defense group leaders, who are clearly breaking Mexican law by picking up military-style arms to fight criminals, say the federal government is no longer arresting them, but recruiting them to help federal forces identify cartel members.

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