Mexican towns rise up and fight back against crime

EL MESON (Mexico): Seven detainees sat stonefaced in a small, dark and windowless cell inside a pink building serving as a makeshift jail in the southwestern Mexican village of El Meson. Vigilante justice is at work in Mexico. In a larger room with only two tables, 16 more men sat or lay still on pieces of cardboard or carpet on the concrete floor. All were shoeless, most shirtless. One had a black eye.

Along one wall, four fidgety women sat on plastic buckets. Only a creaking fan broke the silence and heat.

Outside, around 25 corn and cattle farmers kept guard in a roofed courtyard, wearing masks and carrying hunting rifles. At a table, a hooded man took notes as people gave statements against the suspects.

Fed up with the police’s inability or unwillingness to stop soaring crime, civilians have grabbed rifles and machetes in the mountains of Guerrero state this month to fight back ruthless gangs.

It is the latest self-policing movement to emerge in violence-struck Mexico, after similar cases in the states of Michoacan and Chihuahua in the past four years.

Covering their faces with bandanas or ski masks, hundreds of indigenous residents – some as young as 14 – patrol streets, man checkpoints and arrest people from handwritten lists of suspects.

“We had no other choice,” said a 25-yearold father of three who manned an evening checkpoint in the town of Tecoanapa. “We want to live and sleep in peace.”

El Meson, which is part of the municipality of Ayutla de los Libres, is holding 27 of at least 44 alleged murderers, kidnappers and extortionists, and they may face justice.

“We will completely clean up Ayutla,” said a 28-year-old self-styled “regional commander” armed with a 9mm handgun, who refused to give his name.

The communities want to put the 44 detainees before a popular tribunal as early as this week, with local leaders chosen by the people to hand down sentences that could include years of forced labour in various towns.

Although Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said the new movements were “on the fringes of the law,” he said he understood them and the government has not stopped them. — AFP