Avocado farmers take up arms as Mexico violence spikes
A convoy of vigilantes snakes along a road in western Mexico, vowing to defend their avocado orchards from gangs sowing terror in a country reeling from a new wave of
Armed with assault rifles and other firearms, the masked men travel between plantations and maintain checkpoints in Ario de Rosales in Michoacan state, the scene of a bloody cartel turf war.
Before they began patrolling the area, residents lived in fear of kidnapping, extortion and theft of avocados, according to a member of the self-defense group Pueblos Unidos, which says it has 700 members.
“We need to be armed to defend ourselves,” he told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity, wearing a badge reading “Down with injustice, no more dead.”
Previously, criminals “came to do what they wanted to us, and that doesn’t happen anymore,” he added.
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President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador opposes such self-defense groups — a phenomenon that dates back to 2013 — saying that some of them have become fronts for criminals.
Such comments are not well received in Ario de Rosales, where another Pueblos Unidos member says the president should “get his shoes dirty” to discover the reality of life in the area, where the Jalisco New Generation and Los Viagras cartels operate.
The police and military “feared the criminals or were paid by them to do nothing,” said another vigilante who gave his name as Martin.
- ‘Hugs not bullets’ -
It is estimated that there are around 50 such self-defense groups in Mexico, which has seen intensifying violence in recent months, notably in Michoacan and the northern states of Tamaulipas and Zacatecas.
Mexico registered 14,243 murders in the first five months of the year, and the bloodshed has shown no sign of stopping since then.
Despite the escalation in violence, Lopez Obrador refuses to declare war on the cartels, arguing that this policy failed in the past.
Instead he has maintained a strategy of “hugs not bullets” and fighting crime at its roots by attacking poverty and inequality.
Lopez Obrador has told the United States that he wants to end military cooperation in fighting narcotics trafficking.
“You cannot confront violence with violence,” he said on Friday about the situation in Aguililla, another Michoacan town terrorized by warring gangs.
In April, former US ambassador Christopher Landau said that Lopez Obrador saw the cartels as a “distraction” from a domestic agenda mostly focused on social programs.
Sounds like Biden is running the place.
@catturd2
· 15m
If you don’t know that the entrenched Republican establishment wanted Trump out as badly as Democrats ... you don’t understand just how rotten, corrupt, and deep the swamp really is.