Small Mexican town hasn't had a murder since 2011, due to armed, civilian militias

AsianTrumpSupporter

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Feb 26, 2017
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One Mexican town revolts against violence and corruption. Six years in, its experiment is working

Checkpoints staffed by men with assault rifles, camouflage and body armor greet visitors at the three major entrances to this town.

The guards are not soldiers, police officers, drug enforcers or vigilantes. They are members of homegrown patrols that have helped keep Cheran a bastion of tranquillity within one of Mexico’s most violent regions.

The town of 20,000 sits in the northwest corner of Michoacan, a state where authorities say at least 599 people were killed between January and May, an increase of almost 40% compared with the same period last year. Cheran hasn’t had a slaying or other serious crime since early 2011.

That was the year that residents, most of them indigenous and poor, waged an insurrection and declared self-rule in hopes of ridding themselves of the ills that plague so much of Mexico: raging violence, corrupt politicians, a toothless justice system and gangs that have expanded from drug smuggling to extortion, kidnapping and illegal logging.

Six years in, against all odds, Cheran’s experiment appears to be working.

“We couldn’t trust the authorities or police any more,” said Josefina Estrada, a petite grandmother who is among the women who spearheaded the revolt. “We didn’t feel that they protected us or helped us. We saw them as accomplices with the criminals.”...

...Cheran’s scourge were the talamontes, illegal loggers who worked at the behest of larger mafias and raided the communal forests that are vital to its economy and culture.

The timber thieves would parade through town on hulking trucks, ferrying illegal loads of pine, brandishing weapons and threatening anyone resisting.

Rafael Garcia Avila resisted. He belonged to a town committee that monitored forest use and had taken a stand against illegal logging. He and a colleague were kidnapped by gunmen on Feb. 11, 2011, and never seen again, joining the multitudes of “disappeared” who have vanished during Mexico’s war on drugs.

“My husband loved the forests, the woods, the natural world,” recalled his widow, Maria Juarez Gonzalez, tears welling in her eyes.

The disappearances — along with other killings, assaults, threats, and the plunder of the town’s ancestral forests — became unbearable in a community whose residents retain their identity as Purepecha Indians, one of the few indigenous groups in the area that did not succumb to the Aztec empire.

“The talamontes would drive by in their trucks, laughing at us,” recalled Estrada, a mother of eight — six of them living in the United States — who sells health shakes from a small storefront. “It wasn’t safe to be out at night. It wasn’t safe to be in the forest…. Sometimes I went home and cried and cried.”

Finally, she called some other women and decided to strike back...



This is why the Democrat mafia doesn't want you to be able to own guns.
 
I don't think it's the same militia, but there's a really good documentary called Cartel Land about the militia on the Mexican side and the militia on the American side:

All militia are separate and local. The militia in Little Rock are different from the militia in Ft Worth, etc.

But locals taking firm action to defend their communities is one of the things that they do have in common.
 
+300 million guns in the hands of Americans, yet the worst country in terms of gun violence. For those of us that lived in gun free countries the US looks like a war zone honestly.
 

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