Violence from drug cartels escalates after death of self-defense leader

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APATZINGÁN, Mexico (AP) — The violence of the drug cartels against which the self-defense leader Hipólito Mora gave his life flared up again on Sunday, a day after he was buried, when shootings and roadblocks broke out in the city. of Apatzingán, a commercial axis of the hot land of Mexico.

Trucks and buses planted by cartel members blocked the highways to and from Apatzingán on Sunday morning, with the owners of the vehicles standing nearby helplessly.

“Two guys came out and told me to go through the van. They said that if I move it, they were going to burn it,” said a driver, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

In Apatzingán, a hub for the trade of the area’s agricultural products, gunmen stripped a family of their vehicle, took it away and used it to shoot dead another driver a few blocks away.

The victim’s vehicle was pinned over the railing of a bridge while he lay dead inside, slumped over in the passenger seat.

The execution was so quick that the car kept going a few yards, the front end climbing over the railing and coming to a stop, leaning flat on one side.

A friend of the man said he worked at a car dealership and had gone out to buy a pizza for a family reunion moments before he died. The friend blamed the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG) for the murder, despite the fact that Apatzingán has long been dominated by rival Los Viagras cartel.

The theory is not that far-fetched. The Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, from the neighboring state of the same name, has been waging an offensive to enter Michoacán for years. The roadblocks on Sunday could be because the Los Viagras cartel feared such an attack.

The front lines in the battles are now along the Rio Grande, which is actually a small river that runs about 15 miles (23 kilometers) south of Apatzingán.

The inhabitants of Las Bateas, a riverside town, had to flee their homes about a month ago after fierce shootings broke out between the CJNG and Los Viagras in the fields in front of the houses. CJNG members have crossed the river to seize territory further north, on the outskirts of Apatzingán.

Residents recounted taking cover behind the brick walls of their homes as bullets whizzed by throughout the night.

The Mexican government sent reinforcements from the army and the National Guard, part of an unspoken policy of years to prevent the advance of the CJNG and tolerate Los Viagras.

Residents say they feel a bit safer now and have largely returned to their homes, at least for now.

But the status quo is clearly untenable. Due to systematic extortion by the Los Viagras cartel, many common items in Apatzingán are much more expensive than in the rest of Mexico. A soda, priced at 80 cents elsewhere, costs $1.40 here. A coconut popsicle, which costs 90 cents in the rest of the country, costs $1.75 in Apatzingán.

Those price differentials—and outright extortion that extracts protection payments directly from farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs—is slowly strangling rich farmland.

Mora, one of the last leaders of the self-defense movement in Mexico, fought against all this and it cost him his life. He was buried on Saturday along with two of his loyal supporters who were killed with him on Thursday. With his death, any hope of reviving an armed civilian resistance against the drug cartels virtually disappeared.

As some angry relatives talked of reviving the 2013-2014 armed peasant movement that ousted one cartel — only to see it replaced by others — many doubted that chapter could ever be repeated.

“He thought of his town, of his people, and none of us is going to do that,” said his sister, Olivia Mora, in a tearful speech in front of his coffin.

“None of us are going to do what he did with that courage,” he declared.