Tierra Caliente, Mexico Residents Try To Force Self-Defense Groups Out By Burning Trucks, Blocking Roads

On Jan. 4, members of the “autodefensas” -- self-defense militias, or community police, which have taken up arms in an attempt to drive out the Knights Templar, New Generation, and La Familia drug cartels from their towns in Mexico’s Tierra Caliente region -- took control of the municipality of Parácuaro, in south-central Guanajuato state. Now, La Jornada reports, nearby residents are trying to drive the militias out. On Thursday, they blocked the highway providing access to the town and burned three trucks delivering products from Coca Cola, Corona and Sabritas. But neighbors and militia members say they’re linked to the cartels.

The Associated Press wrote that a self-defense group from elsewhere in the Tierra Caliente had taken Parácuaro on Saturday by setting up checkpoints at the town’s entrance. There, they disarmed some police officers thought to be accomplices to cartels working in the area. One unidentified man was reported killed during a gunbattle as the militia seized control of the town headquarters. La Jornada writes that protestors who gathered on Thursday afternoon near the entrance of the access road to the lime-growing town, where they stopped the three trucks before setting fire to them, had warned members of the self-defense militia that morning that if they did not leave the town by evening, they would start burning vehicles that entered the town.

The Knights Templar and New Generation cartels have been involved in a bloody turf war in the Tierra Caliente, and rumors -- often put out by the cartels themselves -- frequently circulate that various self-defense groups there have been infiltrated by members of either cartel. The Mexican government views the autodefensas as illegitimate and on more than one occasion has sent in federal police to confiscate the groups’ weapons and free police officers who were “arrested” for alleged complicity with the cartels.