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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 17, 2012 - 07:59pm PT
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Because it's illegal?
No, it's 2-fold. They avoid dragging it across the border, and they can sell to/compete with the quasi-legalized smoke-houses in Cali.
Bottom line? The cartels still make cash, and compete for the cash.
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Feb 17, 2012 - 08:00pm PT
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To say that legalizeing weed would not hit the narcos hard in the bank is absurd..
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Feb 17, 2012 - 08:05pm PT
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blue, you miss the point. make it really legal like beer, lower the price to the point that it becomes more of a pain in the ass to produce illeagaly than it is worth.. wall mart the f*#kers right out of buisness..
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Feb 17, 2012 - 08:08pm PT
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BTW I am NOT a stoner. have not had a weed habbit since the 70's and do zero drugs or alcohol.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 17, 2012 - 08:19pm PT
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You're right maybe about legalization, but that will never happen right now. Decriminalization would indeed allow cash to flow to cartels.
And there's coke to consider also, in addition to meth, pills, and heroin.
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pyro
Big Wall climber
Calabasas
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Feb 18, 2012 - 01:04am PT
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i took this picture sometime in january of a Panga. i posted the video on my FB of the fire crew cutting it in 1/2 just to get it outta the beach.
edit: here is the story about this panga boat
http://neglectedwar.com/blog/archives/11151
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Mar 19, 2012 - 11:00am PT
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As I said earlier the average Mexican is in more danger than tourists.
60% of businesses have faced extortion threats which are a by-product of the
drug wars. Today's LA Times:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
In Mexico, extortion is a booming offshoot of drug war
Almost every segment of the economy and society, including businesses, teachers and priests, has been subjected to extortionists who exploit fear of cartels.
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
March 18, 2012, 5:22 p.m.
Reporting from Mexico City—
No taco stand was too small for Juan Arturo Vargas, alias "The Rat."
Every week, Vargas would shake down the businesses in Nicolas Romero, a working-class town an hour outside the Mexican capital. His take: anywhere from $25 to several hundred dollars. His leverage: Pay up, or your kids will get hurt.
The Rat, police and prosecutors say, worked at the low end of a vast spectrum of the fastest-growing nonlethal criminal enterprise in Mexico: extortion.
From mom-and-pop businesses to mid-size construction projects to some of Mexico's wealthiest citizens, almost every segment of the economy and society has been subjected to extortion schemes, authorities and records indicate. Even priests aren't safe.
Extortionists have shut entire school systems, crippled real estate developments, driven legions of entrepreneurs into hiding or out of the country.
And although it is not considered a violent crime, violence readily engulfs victims: When a casino in the industrial city of Monterrey failed to pay off extortionists last year, the place was firebombed, killing 52 people, primarily middle-aged women playing bingo.
Extortion has grown as the largest drug-trafficking cartels consolidate power, leaving many of the smaller groups searching for new sources of revenue.
And it is a crime that feeds on the climate of fear that the drug war has created across wide swaths of Mexico. Anyone can pretend to be a member of the notorious Zeta criminal gang, for example, and easily make money off the target's panic. There is no overhead and little risk for the extortionist.
Mexico's soaring drug-war violence (more than 50,000 people killed in a little more than five years) and incidents such as the casino arson "make the threats seem very credible; that's its success," said Edna Jaime, head of Mexico Evalua, a Mexico City think tank.
"This is a very pernicious crime," she said. "It is underreported and does terrible damage" to society and the economy.
Genaro Garcia Luna, the nation's public safety secretary and head of the federal police, said his officers have investigated 283,000 extortion complaints since the drug war was launched in December 2006. But that's not the full extent of the problem. Experts say probably two-thirds of extortion cases aren't reported to authorities.
Bribe-paying has always been a part of Mexican society. But it is only within the context of the drug war that outright extortion has exploded, in part because perpetrators could emulate ruthless traffickers. Security experts trace the sudden surge in extortion to 2008, when a crime until then largely limited to Mexico City spread across the nation.
"That's when it grew brutally," said Carlos Seoane, general director in Mexico of the private security firm Pinkerton. "Like a swine flu epidemic."
Although complete figures are hard to come by because of the underreporting, the National Citizens' Observatory, a group that compiles crime statistics, estimates that extortion has soared by 180% in the last decade.
The crime generally falls into two categories. The majority of shakedowns are by telephone — as many as 2 million a year — and many of those are made by inmates using throwaway cellphones. In a call or text message, the extortionist pretends to have kidnapped a relative, or threatens to do so, or claims to be outside a business or home, prepared to open fire.
"The bad guy controls the victim like a puppet," said Seoane, who has handled hundreds of extortion cases. "You don't know who's talking, and it generates terror."
In these scams, the extortionist actually has little or no real information about the target and could easily be calling from hundreds of miles away. He counts on fear and in fact poses little real danger. Still, people pay.
"We can do this the peaceful way, or we can go the way of the machine gun," one extortionist told his victim, according to a call recorded by security personnel and made available to The Times.
The more ominous scheme involves gangs who have control over a territory and make their threats in person. They show up at a store, business, factory or construction site to demand "quotas," or derecho de piso, a kind of protection money. You can't operate if you don't pay.
These territory-based extortionists enjoy the advantage of having done enough reconnaissance to know key details about the victims and thus can enhance the threat. The Rat, for example, who is awaiting sentencing, watched his targets long enough to know how many kids they had and where they went to school; he then allegedly used that information to terrorize his victims.
The owners of a very hot nightclub in Cancun decided it was worth the price when goons showed up expecting to be paid about $800 a week. That went on for a few months. Then the extortionists doubled their demand. And now, said a security consultant involved in the case, the price tag is nearly $4,000 a week.
"Now they realize it will never end," the consultant said. "They feel like prisoners."
(Government and private security experts discussed several cases with The Times on condition that the victims not be identified.)
At the Ciudad Juarez store of a big international hardware chain, extortionists called the manager and demanded $50,000. He quickly left the store, only to be intercepted by the callers and held in the trunk of their car for three hours before being released.
"Next time, we kill you," they told him.
Instead of paying, he did what many entrepreneurs are doing: He closed the store and left the country.
The number of Mexican businessmen transplanting themselves, and often their businesses, to the United States has grown enormously in the last five years, as measured by so-called investment visas issued by the U.S. government to wealthy Mexicans, and by the millions of dollars those Mexicans are investing in new enterprises north of the border.
Businesses' flight represents a serious blow to Mexico's struggling economy, in terms of lost investment, lost tax revenue and lost jobs.
A study last year by the Bank of Mexico found that more than 60% of Mexican businesses said they had been hurt by the national climate of lawlessness, with extortion counting as one of the prime factors. Production losses totaled 1.2% of gross domestic product, the study found.
The construction industry is also suffering.
At a shopping mall under construction on the outskirts of Mexico City, the extortionists knew to hit their target on a Saturday: pay day.
With the masons, electricians and plumbers cowering at the back of the site, the extortionists, claiming to be members of the notorious La Familia cartel, said they would open fire on anyone who tried to leave unless they were paid. In that case, according to people involved, the police arrived and arrested the assailants, a rarity. More often, construction foremen routinely make payments to a bag man who arrives weekly or monthly.
Jose Eduardo Correa Abreu, president of the Mexican Chamber of Construction Industry, said the problem has become so bad that in some states, such as violent Guerrero, builders have stopped taking on certain projects.
It's not just the business sector.
Last month, priests from 19 Roman Catholic parishes in the state of Mexico, which surrounds this capital, went to authorities to beg for protection from gunmen who appeared at their churches and demanded monthly payments.
"They were terrified," said David Castañeda, mayor of Atizapan. Threatening priests "is a sensitive point for society."
The priests, from the area where The Rat was working, had reason to be terrified: A couple of weeks earlier, Father Genaro Aviña was found beaten and shot to death in the sanctuary of his Immaculate Conception Church. The extortionists warned that Aviña was the example.
Local authorities installed "panic buttons" in the churches for the priests to call for help next time the gunmen showed up.
A year earlier, priests and evangelical preachers in Michoacan, President Felipe Calderon's home state, reported that they were forced to pay extortionists in order to hold religious holiday festivals.
In Acapulco, thousands of schoolteachers refused to report to their classrooms last fall after extortionists demanded that they fork over part of their salaries. The threats came in letters delivered to the teachers, on signs hung outside the schools and, in a few cases, from men who burst into schools. Much of the school system was paralyzed for months, until the federal government sent troops into the region.
"As a crime, extortion has become totally indiscriminate," Seoane, of Pinkerton, said. "In a country like Mexico, it's easy to trade on fear."
wilkinson@latimes.com
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
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TFPU
Sport climber
Idaho
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Jul 19, 2012 - 07:02pm PT
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Cos-
I completely agree with you that Blue is a f*#kwad but I have to respectfully disagree with you about the media hype. Read Mexican newspapers every morning, not US one's and you will see there is an enormous amount of violence in Mexico right now. Here's the thing; beaches are relativlly safe. but inland it's a slaughter house. Los Zetas and their allies and the Sinaloa Federation are destroying everything as they fight eachother.
Wildone- didn't know the Barrett was only a 2 MOA weapon. I find that interesting....go .338 Lapua!!!
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TFPU
Sport climber
Idaho
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Jul 19, 2012 - 07:16pm PT
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My condolonces Silver. In relative terms the beaches are safer is what I was trying to convey, but then again look at what is happening in Aculpolco. You're right about the police force, not all but most are corruptded. El plato o el plomo...silver or lead is the choice they are given and for most its no choice at all. That's a bad story you have there, I've read many times of young men and women being "arrested" then turning up dead the next day with the police saying we never had them.
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sandstone conglomerate
climber
sharon conglomerate central
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Jul 19, 2012 - 07:20pm PT
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Grow your own, problem solved. With all the medicinal floating around, who the fuk still buys shitty, seedy mersch?
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S.Leeper
Social climber
somewhere that doesnt have anything over 90'
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Jul 19, 2012 - 08:29pm PT
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My wife has an Aunt that lived in Michoacán, and she got the hell out because she was having to pay the cartel a "protection" fee.
I will add that I go to Mexico City twice a year, by car, and I've never had any problems at all.
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Juan Maderita
Trad climber
"OBcean" San Diego, CA
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Jul 19, 2012 - 09:48pm PT
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This article and map/illustration is worth a look:
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-graphic-shows-what-mexican-cartels-and-drugs-come-to-your-town-2012-7
It will be interesting to see what happens over the next six years. President Calderón, the first opposition party (PAN) president, is out. He started, or at least escalated, the "drug war" beginning in 2006. The new President is from the long-time ruling PRI party. Will the Federal government, under PRI direction, continue to use their military to fight the cartels? It seems that State and municipal law enforcement agencies are "bought and paid for" by organized crime.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Saturday's LA Times - Mexico spirals deeper into anarchy.
Zetas cartel occupies Mexico state of Coahuila
The aggressively expanding and gruesomely violent Zetas group dominates territory by controlling all aspects of local criminal businesses.
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
November 3, 2012
SALTILLO, Mexico — Few outside Coahuila state noticed. Headlines were rare. But steadily, inexorably, Mexico's third-largest state slipped under the control of its deadliest drug cartel, the Zetas.
The aggressively expanding Zetas took advantage of three things in this state right across the border from Texas: rampant political corruption, an intimidated and silent public, and, if new statements by the former governor are to be believed, a complicit and profiting segment of the business elite. It took scarcely three years.
What happened to Coahuila has been replicated in several Mexican states — not just the violent ones that get the most attention, but others that have more quietly succumbed to cartel domination. Their tragedies cast Mexico's security situation and democratic strength in a much darker light than is usually acknowledged by government officials who have been waging a war against the drug gangs for six years.
"We are a people under siege, and it is a region-wide problem," said Raul Vera, the Roman Catholic bishop of Coahuila. A violence once limited to a small corner of the state has now spread in ways few imagined, he said.
What sets the Zetas apart from other cartels, in addition to a gruesome brutality designed to terrorize, is their determination to dominate territory by controlling all aspects of local criminal businesses.
Not content to simply smuggle drugs through a region, the Zetas move in, confront every local crime boss in charge of contraband, pirated CDs, prostitution, street drug sales and after-hour clubs, and announce that they are taking over. The locals have to comply or risk death.
And so it was in Coahuila. One common threat from Zeta extortionists, according to Saltillo businessmen: a thousand pesos, or three fingers.
With the Zetas meeting little resistance, wheels greased by a corrupt local government, there was little violence. But the people of Coahuila found themselves under the yoke of a vicious cartel nonetheless.
"It was as if it all fell from the sky to the Earth," said Eduardo Calderon, a psychologist who works with migrants, many of whom have been killed in the conflict. "We all knew it was happening, but it was as if it happened in silence."
The "silence" ended in rapid-fire succession in a few weeks' time starting mid-September. Coahuila saw one of the biggest mass prison breaks in history, staged by Zetas to free Zetas; the killing of the son of one of the country's most prominent political families (a police chief is the top suspect); and, on Oct. 7, the apparent slaying of the Zetas' top leader by federal troops who say they stumbled upon him as he watched a baseball game.
"Apparent" because armed commandos brazenly stole the body from local authorities within hours of the shooting. The military insists that the dead man was Heriberto Lazcano, Mexico's most feared fugitive, acknowledging that he had been living comfortably and freely in Coahuila for some time.
"He was like Pedro in his house," former Gov. Humberto Moreira said, using an expression that means he was totally at home and could go anywhere.
The Zetas had such confident dominion over the state that Lazcano, alias the Executioner, and the other top Zeta leader, Miguel Angel Trevino, regularly used a vast Coahuila game reserve to hunt zebras they imported from Africa.
Since their formation in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a paramilitary bodyguard for the then-dominant Gulf cartel, the Zetas operated primarily in Tamaulipas state on Mexico's northeastern shoulder and down the coast of Veracruz and into Guatemala.
For most of that time, Coahuila, rich in coal mines and with a booming auto industry, was used by cartels as little more than a transit route for drugs across the border. The Zetas maintained a presence limited to Torreon, the southwestern Coahuila city that served as a bulwark against the powerful Sinaloa cartel that reigned in neighboring Durango state.
In 2010, the Zetas broke away from the Gulf cartel, triggering a war that bloodied much of Tamaulipas and spilled over into neighboring states. Coahuila, with its rugged mountains and sparsely populated tracts, became a refuge for the Zetas, and they spread out across the state, including this heretofore calm capital, Saltillo.
Even if the violence hasn't been as ghastly as in other parts of Mexico, nearly 300 people, many of them professionals, have vanished in Coahuila, probably kidnapped by the Zetas for ransom or for their skills.
The man in charge of Coahuila during most of the Zeta takeover was Moreira, the former governor. After five years in office, he left the position a year ahead of schedule, in early 2011, to assume the national leadership of the Institutional Revolutionary Party on the eve of its triumphant return to presidential power after more than a decade.
But scandal followed Moreira, including a debt of more than $3 million he had saddled Coahuila with, allegedly from fraudulent loans. He was eventually forced to quit the PRI leadership, dashing what many thought to be his presidential aspirations.
Tragedy followed when Moreira's son Jose Eduardo was shot twice in the head execution-style in the Coahuila town of Acuna early last month. Investigators believe that most of the Acuna police department turned Jose Eduardo over to the Zetas as a reprisal for the killing of a nephew of Trevino. The police chief was arrested.
Killing the son of a former governor — and nephew of the current one, Humberto's brother Ruben — was a rare strike by drug traffickers into the heart of Mexico's political elite.
In mourning, Humberto Moreira gave a series of remarkably candid interviews in which he accused entrepreneurs from Coahuila's mining sector of sharing the wealth with top drug traffickers who in turn used the money to buy weapons and pay off their troops. They killed his son, he said.
Mining in Coahuila is huge and notoriously dangerous, with companies routinely flouting safety regulations and workers dying in explosions and accidents. The depth to which drug traffickers have penetrated the industry is being investigated by federal authorities.
The question on the minds of many Mexicans was: If Moreira was so aware of criminal penetration, why didn't he stop it?
Critics suggest that during his tenure, he was happy to turn a blind eye to the growth of the Zetas as long as he could pursue his business and political interests. He denies that now and says fighting organized crime was up to the federal government; the federal government blames state officials, in Coahuila and elsewhere, for coddling the drug lords.
"The northern governors have long cut deals with the cartels that operate in their domains. The pattern in the north is cooperation," said George W. Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who has written extensively on the Zetas and Mexican issues.
"The Coahuila police are among the most corrupt in all Mexico."
The extent to which the Zetas' tentacles had penetrated state government became clear this year when federal authorities discovered a protection racket that dated well into Humberto Moreira's administration and was led by none other than the brother of the state attorney general. According to the federal investigation, he and 10 other state officials were being paid roughly $60,000 a month by the Zetas to leak information to the gang.
The nearly 3 million residents of Coahuila, meanwhile, find ways to survive and accommodate.
In rural areas where the Zetas are most commonly seen on the streets, people have learned to be mute and blind. In cities such as Saltillo, they change their habits, don't go out at night, send their children to school in other cities.
A businessman whose family has lived here for generations said, "We are in a state of war, without realizing when or how we got there."
wilkinson@latimes.com
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
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dirt claud
Social climber
san diego,ca
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Jan 23, 2013 - 11:11am PT
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Vigilante groups spring up in Mexico in fight against cartels
AYUTLA, Mexico – The young man at the roadside checkpoint wept softly behind the red bandanna that masked his face. At his side was a relic revolver, and his feet were shod in the muddy, broken boots of a farmer.
Haltingly, he told how his cousin's body was found in a mass grave with about 40 other victims of a drug gang. Apparently, the cousin had caught a ride with an off-duty soldier and when gunmen stopped the vehicle, they killed everyone on the car.
"There isn't one of us who hasn't felt the pain ... of seeing them take a family member and not being able to ever get them back," said the young civilian self-defense patrol member, who identified himself as "just another representative of the people of the mountain."
Now he has joined hundreds of other men in the southern Mexico state of Guerrero who have taken up arms to defend their villages against drug gangs, a vigilante movement born of frustration at extortion, killings and kidnappings that local police are unable, or unwilling, to stop.
Vigilantes patrol a dozen or more towns in rural Mexico, the unauthorized but often tolerated edge of a growing movement toward armed citizen self-defense squads across the country.
"The situation Mexico is experiencing, the crime, is what has given the communities the legitimacy to say, 'We will assume the tasks that the government has not been able to fulfill,'" said rights activist Roman Hernandez, whose group Tlachinollan has worked with the community forces.
The young man and his masked cohorts stop cars at a checkpoint along the two-lane highway that runs past mango and palm trees to Ayutla, a dusty, sun-struck town of concrete homes with red-tile roofs. Pigs, chickens and skinny dogs root in the dirt while the mountains of the Pacific Coast range loom above.
The men wear fading t-shirts, leather sandals and most are armed with old hunting rifles or ancient 20-gauge shotguns hanging from their shoulders on twine slings as they stop cars and check the IDs of passing drivers.
The reach of drug gangs based in Acapulco, about 45 miles (75 kilometers) away, had intensified to the point that they were demanding protection payments from almost anybody with any property: truck and bus drivers, cattle ranchers, store owners. In a region where farmworkers make less than $6 per day, the situation grew intolerable for everyone.
"When they extorted money from the rancher, he raised the price of beef, and the store owner raised the price of tortillas," said a short, stocky defense-patrol commander who wore a brown ski mask and a black leather jacket. Because the patrols are not formally recognized by the courts, the law or the government — and they fear drug cartel reprisals — most members wear masks and refuse to give their full names.
An example of the danger came in late July when the city's official police chief was found shot to death on the edge of town.
It was another attack by criminals that sparked the movement in Ayutla: In early January, gang members kidnapped a commander of an existing community police force in a nearby town.
"Maybe they wanted to intimidate us, but it backfired. They just awakened the people," said one of the older vigilantes, a straw-hatted man without a gun.
Since then, the upstart self-defense movement has spread to other towns and villages such as Las Mesas and El Pericon. On a recent day, Associated Press journalists saw 200 to 300 masked, armed men patrolling, manning checkpoints and moving around in squad-size contingents. Some had only machetes, but most had old single-shot, bolt-action rifles.
Waving guns, they stop each vehicle, and ask for driver's licenses or voter IDs, which they check against a handwritten list of "los malos," or "the bad guys." They sometimes search vehicles and frisk the drivers.
The commander of the Las Mesas vigilantes explains their motives. "We are not against those who are distributing drugs. That's a way for them to earn a living. Let anyone who wants to poison themselves with drugs do it. What we are against is them messing with the local people."
The movement so far seems to be well-accepted by local residents fed up with crime that plagued this stretch of mountain highway.
"In less than a month, they have done something that the army and state and federal police haven't been able to do in years," said local resident Lorena Morales Castro, who waited in a line of cars at a checkpoint Friday. "They are our anonymous heroes."
One vigilante passed sheepishly down the line of waiting cars with a jar asking for donations. Some people tossed in coins or small bills.
Housewife Audifa Miranda Arismendi showed up at the vigilante checkpoint in El Pericon with a vat of chilate, a local beverage made of rice, cocoa beans and cinnamon, for the masked men. "It's good to help out here, because this is for the good of all," she said.
Some officials, too, have cautiously approved of the do-it-yourself police. Guerrero Gov. Angel Aguirre offered to supply them with uniforms so they wouldn't be confused with masked gang members, but he also said he is trying to eliminate the need for vigilantes by beefing up official forces.
Community and indigenous rights activists often see citizen patrols as a good alternative or addition to standard rural police forces that are considered corrupt or repressive.
But clearly, the vigilante squads here present problems even in their first few weeks. The vigilantes in Guerrero are holding, by their own account, 44 people accused of crimes ranging from homicide to theft. Nobody outside the village of El Zapote, where they are being held in a makeshift jail, knows what conditions they are being held in, or what charges, if any, there are against them.
When the head of the Guerrero state Human Rights Commission, Juan Alarcon Hernandez, showed up to check on the prisoners' condition, he was met by about 100 angry villagers who said they didn't want anyone to visit the prisoners. "No, no, no. We want justice!" the crowd shouted.
"We wanted to see what condition these people are in, as a human rights issue and as a humanitarian issue," said Alarcon Hernandez. Eventually, he and his aides turned around and left, unsure how to proceed, because the self-defense squads exist in legal limbo.
Still, the idea of citizen patrols is spreading in Mexico.
In 2011, townsfolk in the pine-covered-hill town of Cheran in neighboring Michoacan state began armed patrols in the face of what they said were the killings of farmers by illegal loggers in league with drug traffickers. In the northern state of Chihuahua, a community of farmers and ranchers known as Colonia Lebaron — most of whom hold dual U.S. citizenship — set up self-defense squads following the 2009 killings of two of its members.
And in the drug-plagued northern state of Sinaloa, the mayor of Concordia, Jose Elijio Medina, responded to a massacre, which forced everyone in a remote hamlet to flee, by calling for the Mexican army to revive the Rural Self Defense Corps, units of armed farmers it once helped train and supervise. While the army did not respond to requests to say how many of the units remain, local media have reported the army has been trying to wind down the few remaining units.
Since 1995, about 80 villages in Guerrero state have organized legal "community police" forces in which poorly armed villagers detain and prosecute people.
With their own jails, "courts" — actually village assemblies that can hand down verdicts — and punishments that can include forced labor for the town or re-education talks, the community police are recognized by state law, though rights activist Hernandez said there is still friction when community rules intersect with the formal legal system.
He pointed to one incident in 2012 where a judge and a detective in the Guerrero town of San Luis Acatlan arrested a community police leader for exceeding his authority. Villagers responded by arresting the judge, the detective and an assistant.
Members of the vigilante squads in Guerrero say what they want from the government is some kind of salary, not modern weapons. What counts, they say, are their ties to the community and resistance to corruption.
"When the people are united, it doesn't matter if it's a .22, a 16-gauge shotgun or 20-gauge. It's that when we are united, not even bullets from an AK-47 can defeat us," said the self-defense commander in Las Mesas. "They can't kill us all."
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ground_up
Trad climber
mt. hood /baja
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Jan 23, 2013 - 11:27am PT
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What a mess.. i really want to get down to do some climbin
there again . Canon Tajo (sp?) is one of the coolest places
I have been ... seems kinda sketchy now ?
What is the answer to their problem ? Indeed it is not a
simple one.
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Don Paul
Big Wall climber
Colombia, South America
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Jan 23, 2013 - 11:39am PT
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Vigilantism isn't a good answer. If the Mexican police and army can't stand up to them, these guys will get blown away. Particularly if the police are ineffective because of corruption, the vigilantees will have no protection.
In Colombia different parts are controlled by different criminal organizations, that fight over turf continuously. There are no communities that can kick all of them out. Perhaps this is cultural, Mexico seems to be heading down the road Colombia did in the early 90s, and I think the situation in Colombia has improved mainly because the problem moved somewhere else.
The only answer I can see is legalization, something the ex- Mexican Ambassador Jorge Castaneda always advocates. Legalize it and let the rich gringo drug addicts solve their own problems.
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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Jan 23, 2013 - 12:05pm PT
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It wouldnt be THAT difficult. Probably EASIER than dealing with the taliban.
Step 1 ) SEAL the border. REMOVE the avenues of trafficking. Then Send in the troops starting a mile into Mexico. Then advance that by a few miles every day.. Yep i said the USA needs to occupy Mexico for a while.
Gee Ron, that does sound easy......
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ground_up
Trad climber
mt. hood /baja
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Jan 23, 2013 - 12:10pm PT
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Ron...that was my first thought also , our
military seems to police the world , why not
in our backyard (mexico) ? We put alot of
resources into border patrol why not keep
headin south and start cleanin house ?
I agree in the " legalize it " attitude also.
it will be interesting to see what plays out
over the next years ...
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