At a storefront drug treatment center here filled with toothless, tattooed men lounging on bunk beds, director Ulises Silva said that in the three months after Moreno’s killing, “nothing has changed” in Apatzingan.
“The narcos will never go away,” he said. “The truth is that the people like the narcos more than the government.”
Compared with more powerful Mexican crime syndicates such as the Sinaloa cartel and Los Zetas, La Familia is a regional franchise, characterized by a penchant for anti-government propaganda and a peculiar brand of evangelical Christianity, forbidding drug use in local communities while reaping millions from narcotics sales and lopping the heads off rivals.
La Familia recruited heavily at rehab centers, and here the men offered visitors signed copies of the book written by El Mas Loco himself, titled “Thoughts.” It was sprinkled with aphorisms such as “if you can dream it, you can do it.”
Along the southwest border, seizures of methamphetamine — La Familia’s signature export — nearly doubled last year, even as the Mexican government poured tens of thousands of troops and federal police into Michoacan.
Whether production at the meth labs in Michoacan has fallen since the December raids “nobody knows,” one U.S. law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, citing security protocols.
Genaro Guizar, the mayor of Apatzingan, and others here said people don’t even believe the La Familia leader is really dead.
The government never recovered a body; federal forces said that fleeing La Familia gunmen took their dead with them after the battle, in which five police officers and three bystanders, including a teenage girl and a baby, were also killed.
“They say the raid was a big show,” said Guizar, who was one of 10 mayors in Michoacan arrested in 2009 on suspicion of collaborating with La Familia.
Guizar, who lived most of his adult life in California where he was a successful restaurateur, served 11 months in jail before being released without any charges in a case that became an embarrassment to the Mexican government.
“Who have they really caught, really killed?” he asked. “People here say they are more afraid of the police than La Familia. They’re never going to win the war this way.”
Worsening violence
More than 35,000 Mexicans have been killed since Calderon first sent his military to battle in late 2006, and last year’s total of 15,273 drug-related killings was the highest toll yet. Homicides rose last year in nine of Mexico’s 10 most violent states, according to government data. Only here in Michoacan did drug killings dip, from 590 to 520. In the first three months of 2011, there have been 123 violent deaths.
Mexican and U.S. officials say that worsening violence is a sign they are winning, forcing the cartels into more desperate acts. The removal of crime bosses increases violence, they say, as competing ascendants initiate new horrors to establish dominance.
Facundo Rosas, the federal police commissioner, said that four of the seven founders of La Familia are dead or detained, and that three are on the run. “The fugitives do not want to lead, and so the group is falling apart,” he said.
But George Grayson, a U.S. scholar who has written a book about La Familia, said the organization has regrouped, forming new alliances with the Sinaloa cartel and other gangs. Moreno, La Familia’s spiritual leader, may be dead, Grayson said, but the organization’s operational chief, Jesus “El Chango” Mendez, is still in charge.
Said Steven Dudley, founder of InSight, which researches organized crime in the Americas: “You remove a powerful head, and it creates multiple sectors competing for control and power. You create not weakness, but chaos.”
On March 9, Michoacan residents awoke to find banners strung up from street lamps announcing the arrival of a new group calling itself the Knights Templar, after the holy warriors from the era of the Crusades.
“From now on, we’ll be working to carry out the acts of altruism that La Familia Michoacana used to perform,” the signs read.
A week later, two men were found hanging from highway overpasses with signs lashed to their corpses. “We killed him because he was a bandit and a kidnapper,” the messages read. “Sincerely, the Knights Templar.”
Loading...
Comments