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| FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2014 file photo, armed men belonging to the Self-Defense Council of Michoacan, (CAM), stand guard at a checkpoint at the entrance of Antunez, Mexico. The government announced that it had reached a deal with vigilante leaders to incorporate the armed civilian groups into old and largely forgotten quasi-military units called the Rural Defense Corps. Vigilante leaders met Tuesday Jan. 28, with government officials to hash out details of the agreement. |
MEXICO CITY
(AP) -- After months of tacit cooperation with rural vigilantes trying
to drive out a cult-like drug cartel, the Mexican government is seeking
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 instill
respect for human rights and due process among more than 20,000 heavily
armed civilians, then eventually disband them and send them back home in
the western state of Michoacan.
In other
Latin American countries, similar experiments have created state-backed
militias that carried out widespread 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 defense corps" manned by
peasants to fight bandits and uprisings in the countryside.
If
the latest experiment works, it will resolve one of the thorniest
dilemmas in 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, which Mexican authorities had been unwilling or unable to take
on for years.
Over the last year, the
vigilantes, many of them 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 stand on the sidelines while the "self-defense" forces routed the
cartel, and occasionally even aid the vigilantes by conducting joint
patrols and manning highway checkpoints together.
Mexican
experts so far have widely accepted the administration's plan announced
late Monday, 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 Defense 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," Samayoa said. "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-defense forces such as the "Convivir" movement that fought
leftist rebels 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-defense"
forces as a stop-gap measure. Unable to disarm the vigilantes because of
the popular support they have for kicking the Knights Templar 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 persuade the vigilantes to
demobilize. The government has stressed the plan is temporary, and says
vigilantes will have to register their guns.
With
self-defense 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 the potential for
wrongdoing by the vigilantes. They note there are fundamental
differences between Michoacan, where relatively prosperous farmers are
funding the vigilantes to fight 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 neighboring Mexico state of Guerrero, where
"self-defense" 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.
It
is a mixed movement, in which upper middle-class orchard owners,
ranchers and businessmen often pay farmworkers to help man -defense
patrols and buy them guns. But the poor were also affected by the
cartel's extortions and abuses, and have often have reasons of their own
to join the movement.
"The comparisons with
Colombia, Peru or Guatemala are an aberration," Benitez said. "Right
now, the `self-defense' forces need the respect of the local residents
and public opinion, so I think they are not going to commit any crimes
now."
