EL TERRERO, Mexico (AP) – In the cradle of Mexico’s vigilant “self-defense” movement, a new group of women has emerged, carrying rifles and blocking roads to avoid what they say is a bloody incursion into the state of Michoacán by the violent Jalisco cartel.
Some of the four dozen women warriors are pregnant; some carry their young children to the barricades. The rural area is crossed by dirt roads, where they fear that armed men from Jalisco may penetrate at a time when the homicide rate in Michoacán has reached levels never seen since 2013.
Many of the watchful women in the village of El Terrero lost their children, brothers or parents in the fighting. Eufresina Blanco Nava said his son Freddy Barrios, a 29-year-old lime picker, was kidnapped by alleged snipers from the Jalisco cartel in pickup trucks; she never heard from him again.
“They have disappeared many people, many, and girls too,” said Blanco Nava.
A woman, who asked that her name not be withheld because she had relatives in areas dominated by the Jalisco cartel, said the cartel had kidnapped and disappeared her 14-year-old daughter, adding: “We will defend those we have left, the children we have left , with our lives. ”
“We women are tired of seeing our children, our families disappear,” said the watchman. “They take our children, they take our daughters, our relatives, our husbands.”
This is partly why women are taking up arms; men are increasingly scarce in the hot zones of lemon cultivation in Michoacan.
“As soon as they see a man who can carry a gun, they take him away,” said the woman. “They disappear. We don’t know if they have them (as recruits) or if they’ve already killed them.”
Beside the barricades and road blocks, the guards have a homemade tank, a heavy duty truck with welded steel armor. In other nearby cities, residents dug trenches on the roads leading to the neighboring state of Jalisco, to keep the attackers out.
Alberto García, a watchful man, saw the medieval side of the war: he is from Naranjo de Chila, a town across the river from El Terrero and the birthplace of the Jalisco cartel leader, Nemesio Oseguera. Garcia said he was expelled from the city by gunmen from the Jalisco cartel because he refused to join the group.
“They killed one of my brothers too,” said Garcia. “They cut him into pieces, and my sister-in-law, who was eight months pregnant.”
El Terrero has long been dominated by the gangs of the New Family Michoacán and Viagras, while the Jalisco cartel controls the south bank of the Rio Grande River. In 2019, Viagras hijacked and burned half a dozen trucks and buses to block the bridge over the river to prevent Jalisco’s trains from entering a surprise attack.
And that same year, in the neighboring town of San Jose de Chila, rival gangs used a church as an armed stronghold to fight an offensive by gunmen in Jalisco. Hidden in the church tower and along its roof, they tried to defend the city against the incursion, leaving the church full of bullet holes.
It is this rigid division in which everyone is forced to choose a side – Jalisco or the New Michoacán Family and the Viagras – that has convinced many that El Terrero’s vigilantes are just private soldiers from one of the last two gangs.
Vigilantes vehemently deny claims that they are part of a criminal gang, although they clearly see the Jalisco cartel as their enemy. They say they would be more than happy if the police and soldiers came and did their job.
El Terrero is not far from the city of La Ruana, where the true self-defense movement was launched in 2013 by lemon producer Hipolito Mora. After successfully expelling the Knights Templar cartel, Mora, like most of the original leaders, distanced himself from the so-called self-defense groups that still exist and is now a candidate for governor.
“I can almost guarantee that they are not legitimate self-defense activists,” said Mora. “They are organized crime. … The few self-defense groups that exist have allowed themselves to infiltrate; they are criminals disguised as self-defense ”.
The current governor of Michoacán, Silvano Aureoles, is more emphatic. “They are criminals, period. Now, in order to camouflage themselves and protect their illegal activities, they call themselves self-defense groups, as if that were a passport to impunity ”.
But in a way, says Mora, the same conditions that gave rise to the original 2013 movement remain: the authorities and the police do not comply with the law and do not guarantee peace to residents.
Sergio Garcia, a member of the watchdog group El Terrero, says his 15-year-old brother was kidnapped and killed by Jalisco. Now, he wants justice that the police never gave him.
“We are here for a reason, to get justice for better or for worse, because if we don’t do it, no one else will,” said Garcia.
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Associated Press writer Mark Stevenson contributed from Mexico City.