Rural Mexican villages dig moats to repel gangsters

[Lodge2004]

This article reads like the teaser for a new release of The Magnificent Seven. At least the locals are beginning to realize the government can't be everywhere and protect everyone. At some point you have to acknowledge it is the way it is because people are willing to tolerate the cartels. Once the people decide enough is enough, the violence will end.

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Ditches don’t always deter raids, but federal troops can’t be spared
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
March 21, 2009, 10:23PM


Ruben Solis, a farmers’ leader, says these moats that villagers dug around Cuauhtémoc were “a means of preservation” for the town. The sentinels at the checkpoints to the village, however, have been removed. 

That proverb about turmoil in small communities has never seemed truer than in this gangster-besieged village and a neighboring one in the bean fields and desert scrub a long day’s drive south of the Rio Grande.

That proverb about turmoil in small communities has never seemed truer than in this gangster-besieged village and a neighboring one in the bean fields and desert scrub a long day’s drive south of the Rio Grande.

Since right before Christmas, armed raiders repeatedly have swept into both villages to carry away local men. Government help arrived too late, or not at all.

Terrified villagers — at the urging of army officers who couldn’t be there around the clock — have clawed moats across every access road but one into their communities, hoping to repel the raids.

“This was a means of preservation,” said Ruben Solis, 47, a farmers’ leader in Cuauhtemoc, a collection of adobe and concrete houses called home by 3,700 people. “It’s better to struggle this way than to face the consequences.”

But shortly after midnight last Sunday, villagers said, as many as 15 SUVs loaded with pistoleros attacked nearby San Angel, population 250, and kidnapped five people. Four victims were returned unharmed a few days later. The fifth hostage, a teenage boy, was held to exchange for the intended target the raiders missed, villagers said.

“We have support of the federal forces,” said an official of the dirt-street village. “Security is what we’re lacking.”

After the earthworks were dug in both villages, volunteers manned checkpoints at the remaining open entrances. Those sentinels, however, were removed when it was decided they couldn’t stop a serious attack, anyhow .

“We aren’t able to confront this sort of thing,” Solis said. “We have a few shotguns, some .22 rifles, a few pistols — nothing compared to what they have.”

President Felipe Calderon’s war on Mexico’s drug gangsters has met with mixed success since he began deploying about 45,000 soldiers and federal police after assuming office in December 2006. The federal forces have been able to defeat the gunmen in open combat but unable, so far, to extinguish the bloodshed or the crime.

Narcotics-related violence killed at least 6,000 people last year and looks likely to match that toll again by Christmas. Kidnappings, extortions and bank robberies are on the rise in many cities and even in rural flyspecks like Cuauhtemoc and San Angel.

Though still far less serious, the troubles faintly echo those of a century ago when Cuencame township, which includes Cuauhtemoc and San Angel, suffered massacres and guerrilla attacks in the lead-up to the Mexican Revolution.

Most of Mexico’s violence these days isn’t politically inspired, but the gangsters’ hit-and-run tactics often mirror those of an insurgency. Government forces frequently find themselves without adequate manpower to be everywhere at once.

“This is really the job of the federal government,” Solis said of his town’s efforts at self-defense. “But they don’t have enough men to keep up. There is delinquency wherever you go.”

Fear of the Zetas
Like others across central and western Mexico, many in and around these villages assume their tormentors are the Zetas, gunmen aligned with the Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros and other cities bordering South Texas.

Government officials blame much of Mexico’s violence on wars between gangs like the Zetas, whose founders were army deserters, for control of smuggling corridors, local drug sales and other rackets.

Solis said he and other townspeople suspect those who raided Cuauhtémoc in early February, kidnapping the 23-year-old son of a bean-and-grain trader, are simply “bad characters from the area who have just taken the Zeta name.”

Fear of the Zetas borders on hysteria in this corner of Durango state, residents and officials agreed. Village boys playing with toy trucks have taken to shouting “here come the Zetas” when staging chases, Solis said.

When a rumor started March 10 in a town nearby that scores of Zetas were planning to attack, stores in the area closed, classes were canceled and people fled.

“A psychosis prevails across the whole region,” said Isidro Aguilar, the police chief of Guadalupe Victoria, a market town 25 miles from Cuauhtemoc, who otherwise denied that the area faces a crime plague. “There are people who are taking advantage of it.”

Still, people’s paranoia doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get them.

Gangsters have staged platoon-strength raids on towns in Chihuahua and other nearby states. Kidnappings have increased, as well as cold-call extortion attempts to even poor residents of the area.

A number of merchants, as well as two members of the city council, have been kidnapped in Guadalupe Victoria since late December, residents said. Ransoms, they said, have reached several hundred thousand dollars.

“No one knows who took them. No one knows anything,” said Gilberto Cabello, the head of the town’s merchants association. “Everyone is left wondering who is next.”

Defense left to the town
Not surprisingly, villagers in Cuauhtemoc and San Angel remain on edge, sharply eyeing strangers, careful not to say too much to outsiders.

“The less said about this, the better,” said a city hall official in Cuencame, the township seat. “It can be dangerous to say too much.”

Soldiers and federal police took up the defense of Cuauhtemoc and San Angel last week after the towns’ plight played on the front page of a Mexico City newspaper. But the patrols evaporated after a few days, leaving nothing but the ditches in the villagers’ defense.

“That’s the way it is,” said a sun-weathered Roberto Fuentes, who was helping build a sidewalk a block from one of Cuauhtemoc’s earthworks. “If the government doesn’t do it, we have to.

“Here, the people are defending the town.”

[Liberty]

This article reads like the teaser for a new release of The Magnificent Seven. At least the locals are beginning to realize the government can't be everywhere and protect everyone. At some point you have to acknowledge it is the way it is because people are willing to tolerate the cartels. Once the people decide enough is enough, the violence will end.

They are at a bit of a disadvantage the Government denies them of the means to protect themselves. While the bad guys seem to have access to an endless supply. Some of these villages are remote, and not only do they not not have 911 many of these people don't have phones or electricity.

I spent some time working there last year. I was going up and down a pipeline between the border and Monterey. I learned that the people were scared of the gangs and felt completely helpless. The gangs kidnap the young men as recruits and use their young girls as property. Someone wrote about how devoutly Catholic the people there are. I noticed the Many od the old Churches seemed abandoned and empty, while fresh Idols and shrines of Santa Muerté were every where along the border. I think the villagers and ranchers need to be armed and trained. The way it is now a group of about a half dozen can just prance right in and the people are powerless. Instead the Mexican government is telling ours we need disarm our citizenry.

It makes no sense.

[bryang]

What is it with the anti gun people in America? Don't they see what has happen to every country around the world that has unarmed the citizenry? Are they just ignorant and can't see beyond the end of their nose?
It has to be they are willfully ignorant and do not care about the consequences of their stupidity.

-geo

[quidni]

It has to be they are willfully ignorant and do not care about the consequences of their stupidity.

It's been said before: "Gun Control" has never been about guns. It's all about control.

[bryang]

It has to be they are willfully ignorant and do not care about the consequences of their stupidity.

It's been said before: "Gun Control" has never been about guns. It's all about control.

That is very true and they have to disarm the people so as to have absolute control over them. This is what the Founding Fathers warned about in their writings and why they drew up the Constitution the way they did so as to protect us from that very thing. But when you have people in gov that have thrown the Constitution aside...this is a very serious and frightening thing.

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny ...
Thomas Jefferson

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Thomas Jefferson

Quidni, I am not preaching to you, I know you know these things. It is just so heart breaking to see our country in the shape it is in.

-geo