Clash of officials, vigilantes leaves 11 dead
LA CONCEPCION, Mexico — The brothers leading the nearly 15-year fight against a Mexico dam project have been hailed as environmental heroes, but after a confused gunfight between their vigilante forces and other townsfolk, they are now in jail facing homicide charges.
Some residents around the proposed La Parota dam near Acapulco said the Suastegui brothers have been oppressors who used their “community police” vigilante group to attack elected officials who didn’t agree with them.
Those disputes erupted into a Jan. 7 confrontation between villagers in which eight were killed — six villagers and two from the antidam police force — followed by a state police raid in which in which three more anti-dam vigilantes died.
It is the latest in a series of conflicts that have erupted across parts of southern Mexico where townsfolk, usually fed up with violence and corrupt police, have created their own “community police” forces with no allegiance — and often outright hostility — to elected authorities.
La Concepcion is one of numerous small communities in the mountains east of Acapulco split by federal plans for the vast hydroelectric project. All or parts of two dozen villages would disappear under the reservoir’s waters. But some communities downstream, which won’t be flooded, support the dam, which would bring jobs to the impoverished region.
“The towns are divided by politics because the government divides the people,” said Leandro Elacio, coordinator of the group whose name roughly translates as the Council of Communities Opposed to the La Parota Dam. Elacio claims government aid programs are given to dam supporters and not opponents, and that gravel companies offer local households as little as 1,000 pesos per year for the right to scoop out the bed of the river to use in construction, damaging the environment.
Since 2003, the antidam group founded by Vicente and Marco Antonio Suastegui has managed to block the hydroelectric project on the Papagayo, successfully arguing in court that the government had meddled with local assemblies in the 47 towns and hamlets in the watershed that have to vote to approve the project.
The Suasteguis and some of the group’s other leaders have been arrested several times over protests against the project, and assert they were tortured.
Three years ago, the opponents took a step further: They formed a community police force of almost 100 men, claiming authority from show-of-hands community assemblies they said had more validity than official elections.
Such groups are common in tightly knit indigenous communities where centuries-old practices include rule by a council of elders and cooperative community work. They punish minor crimes with work, short imprisonment and readaptation. A Guerrero state law specifically allows indigenous communities to form such police forces.
But disgust with police corruption and drug gang violence has led people in other parts of Guerrero and neighboring states to form their own versions of citizen police — vigilante groups that sometimes battle the cartels and in some cases have been infiltrated by them. And they often find themselves in conflict with elected authorities, as in La Concepcion, a town of about 1,300 people.
One of those authorities, recently elected town manager Lucio Mendez, had been taken prisoner by the community police three days before the clash broke out. A dam supporter, he says he was unjustly held because of differences of opinion. The community police accused the nearly toothless farmer of leading an armed plot to kill vigilante leader Marco Antonio Suastegui.
“They started to beat me, they ordered my head shaved,” he said.
“My head was bleeding because they cut me with the scissors,” he recalled. “They put chains on me … and a sign that said ‘I am the future town manager, and I am being re-educated,’ and they walked me around, with no shoes … to humiliate me.”