Masked gunmen took over a Mexican town and police stood by as 13 men disappeared

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/22/chilapa-mexico-vigilantes-los-rojos-men-disappeared

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When Matilde Abarca heard that armed vigilantes had dragged her son Sergio de Román from the market stall where he sold mangos, she rushed to beg for his release at one of the checkpoints the group had erected in the Mexican town of Chilapa.

The masked men simply shooed her away.

Abarca then went to the police station, where officers told her they could do nothing until she filed a formal report at a government office on the other side of town.

On her way there, she stopped a passing army convoy, but all the soldiers did was take down her son’s name. And when Abarca reached the government building, she was told that nobody was available to speak to her.

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That was more than a week ago.

“We are desperate but what can we do?” Abarca said in a telephone interview. “We need the authorities to see what is happening in Chilapa. To see how we have been abandoned.”

Sergio de Román, 25, is one of at least 13 young men who disappeared during the five days that Chilapa was taken over by hundreds of armed men who said they had come to drive out a local drug gang called Los Rojos, or the Reds.

Over the past two years, self-styled vigilante groups have sprung up across the states of Guerrero and Michoacán in response the government’s apparent inability to rein in the organised crime which has turned parts of both states into killing fields. Describing themselves as community police forces or self-defence units, they have experienced some success in driving the narcos from some areas.

They have also been accused of abusing their power to settle old grudges, and even colluding with competing criminal syndicates.

But in the case of Chilapa, locals believe that the masked men were simply members of a rival gang, Los Ardillos, who launched a daylight incursion into Rojos territory – while local and federal authorities watched from the sidelines.

The supposed vigilantes who marched into Chilapa on 9 May carried assault rifles and masked their faces with balaclavas or bandannas. Over five days, they roamed freely around the town, carrying lists of supposed Rojos and demanding that locals tell them where to find the gang’s chief.

The authorities did nothing to stop them. Security in Chilapa had actually been reinforced after the murder of a candidate in the upcoming mayoral election, and both state and federal police forces were stationed in the town. Army troops were present too, but none of them intervened when the vigilantes forced their way into homes and workplaces and dragged men away.

When a few hundred locals took to the street to demand the vigilantes withdraw, the gunmen tore up their paper signs calling for peace and threatened the protesters. Locals say the police and soldiers refused to take action.

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After five days the vigilantes withdrew. By then, locals say, as many as 30 young men had disappeared without a trace. They said many of their families have not filed reports with the police for fear of retaliation.

One woman, whose 18-year old son vanished while delivering tortillas, agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

“I thought I would be able to do something to rescue him now, but nobody helped,” she said. “It is very dangerous here. I am only talking at all because I want my son back.”

The masked men finally left Chilapa on 15 May, after a deal with the state authorities which included the sacking of the local security chief whom they accused of colluding with the narcos. The state governor, Rogelio Ortega, welcomed the deal, which he said had brought peace to the city.

Then the stories of the disappearances began to emerge. Most relatives fear the worst; others cling to the hope that their missing relative is still alive, perhaps forced to work in the opium poppy fields that pepper the mountainous region beyond Chilapa.

On Wednesday – nearly a week after the vigilante withdrawal – the federal police commissioner, Enrique Galindo, flew to Chilapa to meet with relatives of the disappeared. He promised them that every case would be thoroughly investigated.

An official from the federal police, however, said that each case would be treated individually. They did not constitute a mass disappearance, he said, because each case was different and they were not associated with a single event. Federal forces had not intervened during the occupation, he added, for fear of provoking a bloodbath.

On Thursday three dismembered bodies wrapped in blankets were found dumped outside a cemetery in a village about 10 minutes drive from Chilapa. According to the Guerrero-based newspaper El Sur, state authorities said they were killed about two weeks ago.

The lack of urgency in the official response has drawn comparisons with the slow reaction by security forces when 43 students disappeared 26 September 2014 in another part of Guerrero after being attacked by municipal police in league with another local drug cartel.

Ortega, the state governor, insisted that the vigilantes were at least partially formed by people fed up with intimidation and extortion by Los Rojos. He said this was why the state government had negotiated their withdrawal, rather than seek to force it.

“It is a very complicated situation because both Ardillos and Rojos have penetrated the social fabric,” Ortega told Radio Fórmula on Thursday. “The Rojos control the city and the Ardillos have a strong presence in outlying areas.”

That may be true, conceded José Díaz, who has taken on the role of spokesman for the relatives of Chilapa’s disappeared. But he pointed out that none of those who went missing during the vigilante occupation appeared on the list of suspcted Rojos.

Díaz argues that the authorities’ failure to stop the abductions represents a blatant abdication of the Mexican state’s responsibility to its citizens. “There is no authority here, no government,” Díaz said. “The criminal groups have control and nobody says anything.”