Soldiers man checkpoints in western Mexico’s Hot Land region while police armed with assault rifles travel in convoys days after officers died when their helicopter came under fire and crashed.
The incident last week showed that the deployment of government security forces and the emergence of vigilante groups in recent years has done little to pacify the notoriously violent region in the state of Michoacan.
The Knights Templar drug cartel once held sway in the area, extorting anyone from lime growers to tortilla sellers, until self-defence forces emerged in 2013 and authorities took down its top leaders.
But the cartel’s breakup led to the emergence of several smaller criminal groups.
The helicopter crash showed that lawbreakers are well armed.
In the week before the helicopter was shot at while pursuing suspected gang leaders, authorities detained 12 people and seized an arsenal that included 12 rifles, one.50-caliber rifle, a grenade, two rocket launchers, two rocket-propelled grenades and 3,650 bullets.
The state prosecutor’s office said Saturday it was investigating whether the helicopter smashed into a field after manoeuvring to avoid bullets on September 6 near the village of El Chauz.
Days earlier, national security commissioner Renato Sales said the helicopter was “downed” by criminals who apparently fired a powerful.50-caliber Barrett rifle, killing the pilot and four state police officers.
While police face heavily armed criminals, fear has not left the rural towns of Michoacan.
In villages around the crash site, a region of lime and mango orchards, few people were willing to speak to reporters last week.
The few who spoke did so in a whisper, noting how the area was only safer now because of the sudden deployment of security forces.
Before the helicopter incident, “bad guys” roamed freely in the region, said one resident who requested anonymity due to security concerns.
“I am sure that people know who are the criminals who ravage the populations of the region, but they don’t want to say,” governor Silvano Aureoles said.
“And I understand it, because there’s fear,” Aureoles said at a news conference after the crash.
Former president Felipe Calderon chose Michoacan to send the first deployment of soldiers in his militarized war against drugs in 2006.
His successor, Enrique Pena Nieto, has kept troops in the streets since taking office in December 2012.
Patricio Madrigal, the mayor of Nueva Italia, a town near the crash site, said criminals used to be so powerful that they “practically picked mayors” in 2011 and 2012 elections.
By 2013, farmers were so fed up by the authorities’ failure to stop crime that they formed vigilante militias and began to fight back.
The Knights Templar’s top leader, Nazario El Chayo Moreno, was killed by troops in March 2014 while his successor, Servando La Tuta Gomez, was arrested almost a year later.
Since then, “everyone wants to take their place”, Hipolito Mora, a lime grower and founder of the vigilante militias, told AFP.
“Many of those who are doing this damage (now) are people who were always members of the Knights Templar drug cartel,” Mora said.
A former vigilante who is now a state police officer said on condition of anonymity that in addition to remnants of the Knights Templar, groups such as the Viagras and the Trojans have appeared.
Members of the self-defence forces, meanwhile, have faced accusations of being infiltrated by drug cartels.
Aureoles declared the end of vigilante militias in February.
“People knew where the enemy was before, what their strategies were.
Now we don’t know where they are,” said Patricio Madrigal, a priest in the municipality of Nueva Italia.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this but the governor should know who they are,” said the priest, who worked with a psychologist to create a group to care for victims.
A Mexican court will hear the US extradition case of drug kingpin Joaquin El Chapo Guzman on September 26, his lawyer said yesterday, vowing to appeal if he loses.
The court in Mexico City will weigh two petitions filed by Guzman to block his extradition, which was approved by the foreign ministry in May, his lawyer Jose Refugio Rodriguez told AFP.
“The judge can make a decision — or not — right there and then, but usually in these cases he takes time to analyze it,” Rodriguez said, adding that a ruling could also take “days or weeks.”
If the judge accepts the extradition, Guzman will have 10 days to appeal the decision in a higher court, the lawyer said, noting that he could also take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
The powerful chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel was arrested in January, six months after he brazenly escaped prison in a 1.5km tunnel.
The foreign ministry agreed in May to accept two US extradition requests.
He faces cocaine smuggling charges in California and multiple accusations, including murder, in Texas.
Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto had previously opposed Guzman’s extradition, preferring to prosecute the country’s most notorious prisoner in Mexico.
But Pena Nieto called on the attorney general to expedite the extradition process after the kingpin’s July 2015 escape — his second jailbreak — which embarrassed the administration.
A US government official has told AFP that the extradition process could be finalised before the end of the year, but Rodriguez said it could take years.
Mexico has widened its investigation into the abduction and apparent massacre of 43 trainee teachers in the southwestern city of Iguala in 2014 to examine the role of federal and state police, a federal prosecutor said.
During the first year of the investigation, authorities focused on the municipal police in Iguala and the nearby town of Cocula, who federal prosecutors said were in cahoots with a drug gang suspected of killing the students.
The disappearance of the 43, on September 26, 2014, sparked international outcry, battering Mexico’s reputation and plunging President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration into crisis.
Alfredo Higuera, the special federal prosecutor assigned to the case, said in an interview that the probe had now gathered about 100 additional declarations in recent weeks from 19 federal police and 39 from the state of Guerrero.
“Individuals from all forces have made declarations, obviously including people at the federal level,” said Higuera, who took office a month after a group of international experts appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) cited deep flaws in the government’s investigation.
The government’s account stated that the 43 were abducted by corrupt police and handed over to suspected members of local drug cartel Guerreros Unidos, who then killed them, incinerated the bodies and threw their ashes into a river.
The government said it believed the gang had targeted the students in the belief they were linked to a rival outfit.
The remains of only one of the missing youths have been definitively identified so far, and the CIDH report on the disappearances picked serious holes in the government findings.
Higuera said important new information had been gleaned from the analysis of hundreds of calls made by police and officials on the night of the disappearances, as well as from suspects in custody and students who disappeared.
“This is an investigation that goes beyond any situation, both because of the number of victims and the number of people who took part in it,” Higuera said.
The probe is now putting greater stress on determining whether students could have been brought to a variety of places after they were abducted, rather than a single location.