Let me get this straight, the thugs are more trustworthy because they're local thugs? Uh...ok.
You’re a city boy - you think of vigilanteism as the gang culture. Not here, it’s good and decent men protecting their families. Same way in Mexico and I STILL applaud them for protecting their families.
Presuming you're correct that it's good men acting in a totally criminal and unlawful manner in your locale, which I don't, how do you know that the same holds true in Mexico? Other than the notion that you want to believe, no scratch that, romanticize that these are good men in Mexico protecting their families, what proof can you offer that this is the case?
Want some real examples of vigilantism? Tennessee two years ago: Robert Bell and Gary Lamar set fire to a sex offenders house, an act that many FReepers would applaud no doubt. Problem was that their target escaped the blaze, but Melissa Chandler died a fiery death.
Pennsylvania, June of this year, Michael Zenquis was beaten by a group of baseball bat wielding vigilantes because a little girl had been raped by a man close to his description. The real rapist was caught two days later.
Vigilantes make good television where the bad guys always get theirs and innocents are spared. In the real world, not so much.
I see where you’re coming from. Thanks for that understanding.
Yes, I STILL trust the guys in my area to protect the families here and I STILL put faith in Mexico’s men to protect their families.
I hope they’re not thugs. I hope they are men like we have here, good and decent. I think there are far more cases of men protecting their families than the odd case of the horrible examples you’ve given. At least, I hope and pray there are so many more cases.
That’s another example of why I think government and law enforcement should be local rather than federal. Only those of us who live here know who is good and bad.
For cities, God help you folks.
Describing vigilante episodes here in the States is not the same.
In the U.S. it would be a very rare occurance that a man could rape a woman in broad daylight in the street and then walk calmly to his brother’s house across the street and sit on the porch openly laughing at the woman and her brothers who came to take care of her. In the U.S., that man would be arrested. In Mexico, that man is clapped on his back by the Chief of Police... his brother.
How do you describe men who beat him to death two days later as thugs?
Yes, thugs are there, but at the beginning of any vigilante movement most of the participants are law abiding citizens who cannot get justice or protection any other way.
The men who burned the house and beat the wrong man had other ways to get justice. They could have worked with the police. They could have let the courts work. They didn’t.
It’s different in Mexico, there you either take on the role of dispensing justice or justice never arrives. They aren’t thugs, they are desperate.