The mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, are home to illegal poppy and

The mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, are home to illegal poppy and marijuana cultivation. Drug war-related
violence has engulfed the state for years, and citizens have taken up arms and formed community police or autodefensa groups.
PO R TFO L I O
Mexico:
Vigilante Justice
P H O T O E S S AY B Y
J U D I T H M AT L O F F
P H OTOS BY
K AT I E O R L I N K S Y
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T
IERRA COLORADA, Mexico—The main road on the
mountain ridge had vanished in a landslide, and what was
once the tarmac hung off the cliff like a ribbon. Construction workers hired by the government excavated boulders so vehicles could pass. But anyone trying to plough through faced another
obstacle—farmers with shotguns manning a roadblock on a curve.
A driver exited his car to talk with the men in beige uniforms, who
asked for his name and mission. Assured no mischief was intended,
the citizen policeman at the barricade waved him on. “If you get
stuck in the mud, alert us,” advised the man who appeared to be in
charge, a corn farmer who volunteers for regular shifts to maintain
order. “We control the path.”
Over the past year, self-defense units have spread across Mexico’s
southern state of Guerrero and Michoacan to the west—defying the
terror of drug gangs. The vigilantes complain that authorities are
Judith Matloff teaches conflict reporting at the Columbia University
Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of Home Girl (2008)
and Fragments of a Forgotten War (1997). Katie Orlinsky is a photographer and contributor to Reportage by Getty Images and regularly
works for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde,
and a variety of international magazines.
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Community police patrol the Montaña region in Guerrero, Mexico.
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A community police group patrols on foot near
Marquelia, Guerrero.
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complicit or impotent to end the abductions, assassinations, and extortions perpetrated by what is euphemistically called
“organized crime.” An in-your-face challenge to authorities and drug lords alike,
hundreds of peasants—like those on this
hill—patrol in trucks, seizing towns, and
taking prisoners. The sway of the vigilantes varies by the month as groups split and
wither. But a safe estimate is that they are
a formidable presence in at least two dozen
municipalities.
Many villagers welcome vigilantes as
the only answer to the drug violence that
has killed so many thousands of Mexicans
that hard numbers are impossible to track.
J US TI CE
Yet while acknowledging the state’s lost
legitimacy, security experts see danger in
yet more rogue forces running around with
weapons and no accountability. “You don’t
know who is the ultimate boss of these
guys. The risk is that [at] some point,
the self-defense units will get involved
in drugs or extortion,” said Jorge Chabat,
an expert on narco-trafficking from the
Mexico City-based research center CIDE
(Center for Research and Teaching in Economics).
Severo Castro is the mayor of Ayutla, a
town in Guerrero where the movement ignited in January 2012. Angry peasants went
door to door to rid the municipality of the
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Community police supervise manual labor by
local criminals they have arrested in the Costa
Chica region of Guerrero, Mexico.
bullies who trafficked heroin and harassed
residents. Within weeks, most of the drug
traffickers had fled, and order returned. But
new abuses arose among the volunteer protectors and their organization, referred to
as UPOEG (Union of People and Organizations of the State of Guerrero.)
“I think the groups have good intentions, but some members have begun
to commit errors, for instance detaining
people without proof,” Castro said. “They
should not be moving around armed along
the highway. It’s worth noting that within
the self-defense groups are some people
who have committed crimes. Now that I
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am getting to know these people, I realize that we don’t know everything about
them.”
Above all, his aim is to avoid confrontation. “It’s not helpful. They have their
own rules. If I go and say, ‘I know this
citizen. He is a hard worker, a clean family man,’ they may release him freely. Or
they may say, ‘Mr. Mayor, you are defending a criminal.’” While his state governor
has reportedly tried to buy off the selfdefense groups, the federal government
has expressed intolerance for what it terms
“vigilantes.” In mid-January, troops were
deployed to try to disarm vigilante groups
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that have been fighting with the Knights Templar drug cartel in a
particularly turbulent area of Michoacan.
The groups span a wide territory. Arguably, the greater legitimacy lies with community police in indigenous settlements,
which for two decades have been exercising their constitutional
right to enforce their brand of justice. They make judgments collectively in assemblies. Then there are the independent vigilantes
who rather spontaneously, about a year ago, began brandishing
high-caliber weapons to stand up to organized gangs. These include UPOEG and the Michoacan groups.
Indeed, rumors abound that the folks fighting the Knights
Templar may be sponsored by a rival cartel, or rich property owners who want to defend their businesses.
Chabat saw dangerous precedents in Colombia, where squads
ostensibly posing resistance to leftist guerrillas morphed into cocaine trafficking paramilitaries.
Mexico’s loose cannons could also go the way of the Yakuza mafia in Japan, which began by protecting communities and at some
point came under the hire of rich criminals. “It would be best that
these gangs don’t have any need to exist,” Chabat observes. But, he
notes sadly, in absence of clean authority, they continue to reign.
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Men arrested for dealing drugs are transported to
prison by community police in Marquelia, who also
check for guns and drugs at the door of a party in
Marquelia in the Costa Chica region of Guerrero,
Mexico.
A woman waits outside a self-defense public
meeting in Tierra Colorado, Guerrero.
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Secundino Rubio Peralta and Margarita del Carmen Villegas
hold a photograph of their son, Bonfilio Rubio, who was
murdered by a stray bullet shot by Mexican soldiers at a
checkpoint in the Montana region of Guerrero.
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CHI LDL ES S
V I LLA G E
A prison in the citizen police base in Xaltianguis,
Guerrero.
WINTER 2013 / 2014
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