Pubdate: Tue, 28 Jan 2014
Source: Calgary Herald (CN AB)
Copyright: 2014 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: 
http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/letters/letters-to-the-editor.html
Website: http://www.calgaryherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/66
Author: Mark Stevenson

MEXICO ENLISTS ARMY OF HARDENED VIGILANTES TO FIGHT DRUG CARTEL

Mexico City, Mexico - After months of tacit co-operation with rural
vigilantes trying to drive out a cult-like drug cartel, the Mexican
government has moved to permanently solve one of its toughest security
problems with a plan to legalize the growing movement and bring it
under the army's control.

But the risks are high.

To succeed, the government must enforce military discipline and instil
respect for human rights and due process among more than 20,000
heavily armed civilians before returning them home to the western
state of Michoacan.

In other Latin American countries, similar experiments have created
state-backed militias that carried out massive human rights abuses as
armed civilians turned to vengeance, or assisted in mass killings. The
Mexican army itself has been accused of rights abuses during the more
than seven-year war against organized crime that has seen it deployed
as a police force in much of the country.

Vigilante leaders met Tuesday with government officials to hash out
details of the agreement that would put avocado and lime pickers with
AR-15 semi-automatic rifles under army command. The Mexican military
has a century-old tradition of mobilizing "rural defence corps" of
peasants to fight bandits and uprisings in the countryside.

If the latest experiment works, it will resolve one of the thorniest 
dilemmas of the barely year-old administration of President Enrique 
Pena Nieto: how to handle a movement that sprang up outside the law 
but successfully took on a pseudo-religious drug cartel, the Knights 
Templar, that Mexican authorities had been unwilling or unable to 
take on for years.

Over the last year, the vigilantes, many former migrant workers who
spent years in the United States, have seized a dozen towns terrorized
by extortion, killings and rapes at the hands of the cartel's gunmen.
Members of the Knights Templar have tried to portray themselves as
soldiers in a reincarnation of a medieval religious order dedicated to
Christianity and the expulsion of abusive police from their
communities.

In many instances, Associated Press reporters have witnessed federal
forces standing on the sidelines while the "self-defence" forces
routed the cartel, and occasionally even aiding them by conducting
joint patrols and manning highway checkpoints together.

Mexican experts so far have widely accepted of the government's
late-Monday move, calling it a smart way to maintain the movement's
momentum against the Knights Templar while protecting the government
against charges it was ceding the rule of law in the "hot lands" of
Michoacan, a rugged Pacific Coast state of rich agricultural land and
mountains studded by marijuana fields and methamphetamine labs.

But in other parts of Latin America, the news stirred traumatic
memories.

Claudia Samayoa, a human rights activist in Guatemala, said the
thousands of deaths attributed to the army-backed Peasant Self Defence
Patrols during the country's 1960-1996 civil war are too fresh to
allow for more paramilitary forces in the region.

"The cure is going to be worse than the disease," said Samayoa. "It
would be better not to go down that road, and instead strengthen law
enforcement and the justice and public safety systems."

Margarita Solano, of the U.S. risk-analysis firm Southern Pulse, said
Mexico's vigilantes have awakened memories of her native Colombia's
experience with self-defence forces such as the "Convivir" movement
that fought leftistrebels in the 1990s. While the groups were
initially welcomed, some were later accused of rights abuses. "I'm
finding differences and certain similarities that are frightening,"
Solano said.

Mexican authorities are portraying the legalization of the
"self-defence" forces as a stop-gap measure: unable to disarm the
vigilantes because of the popular support they received after kicking
the Knights Templar drug cartel out of much of the state, federal
officials will now have to work with them to clean up the rest of the
gang -- and then convince the vigilantes to demobilize. The government
has stressed the plan is temporary, and said vigilantes will have to
register their guns.

With self-defence checkpoints on most major roads in Michoacan's hot
lands, and armed vigilantes often drinking beer or smoking marijuana
at their posts, there are ample possibilities for abuses.

But many Mexicans are less concerned than outsiders about wrongdoing
by the vigilantes-turned-rural forces. They note there are fundamental
differences between Michoacan, where relatively prosperous farmers are
funding the vigilantes to fight drug cartel extortions, and Guatemala,
Colombia and Peru, where poor farmers were pressed by right-wing
governments into fighting bitter wars against leftist rebels.

In the rich, flat lands of Michoacan, "there aren't any leftist
guerrillas or poor farmers," said Raul Benitez, a security expert at
Mexico's National Autonomous University. "Here there are well-off
farmers fighting criminals."

Unlike the vigilante movement in the neighbouring Mexico state of
Guerrero, where self-defence forces are often anti-government, many of
Michoacan's vigilantes say they just want to get back the rich pasture
and lime groves that the Knights Templar stole from them.

"The comparisons with Colombia, Peru or Guatemala are an aberration,"
said Benitez. "Right now, the self-defence forces need the respect of
the local residents and public opinion, so I think they are not going
to commit any crimes now."

Photo: Armed men belonging to the Self-Defense Council of Michoacan, 
(CAM), stand guard at a checkpoint set up by the self-defense group 
at the entrance to the town of Antunez, Mexico. (Photograph by: 
Eduardo Verdugo , AP) 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D