Vigilante justice rises in Mexico
MEXICO CITY — Vigilante attacks and mob justice appeared to be on the rise in Mexico this week as violence mounted, more than two dozen bodies appeared along roadsides and the government ruled out any new crackdown on criminal gangs.
Prosecutors in the northern state of Sinaloa said five young men have been murdered in recent days, and in all five cases toy cars were carefully placed atop their corpses. The men were apparently car thieves, and the toys indicated both the reason they were killed and served as a warning to other thieves.
The latest such murder came Wednesday. Prosecutors said the victim had been identified as the same man seen on security camera footage earlier that day stealing a pickup truck at gunpoint from a woman outside her home in the state capital, Culiacan.
That same day, a total of seven suspected kidnappers were killed by townspeople in the largest mass lynching in recent memory in the central state of Puebla. Some were beaten, some hanged.
The National Human Rights Commission said 43 people have been killed in lynchings so far this year, and 173 injured. That was up from the already-record year for mob justice in 2018.
“Those who take justice into their own hands commit acts of barbarism, not justice,” the commission said.
Vigilantes say they have to act because authorities won’t crack down on criminal gangs.
On Thursday, the notoriously violent Jalisco cartel killed 19 people whose bodies — in some cases dismembered — were left hanging from an overpass and strewn along a highway in the western state of Michoacan. Another set of four dismembered bodies were found in plastic garbage bags the same day on a highway in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, and a few hours later, five more bodies were found wrapped in garbage bags elsewhere in the state.