by Ioan Grillo
CHAPTER 45
As 2014 dawned, vigilantes poured from the hills to surround Apatzingán. Their first target was Parácuaro, which they stormed on January 4. The Templars could not give up a base so close to their heartland without a fight. They hijacked buses and left them burning on the highway to try and stop the vigilante convoys. The vigilantes drove around them, using dirt roads. Templar bosses knew they were outnumbered and fled, but ordered their gunmen to take a stand.
Pitched battles ensued, with vigilantes fighting their way in street by street. A Templar stormed out of a building carrying a bazooka. A vigilante reacted fast, spraying bullets before the Templar could fire his load. The narco fell to the ground, his dead finger lying limp on the bazooka trigger.1
The remaining Templars realized they were outgunned and ran, fell, or surrendered. As the vigilantes secured the town, they stormed the police station and disarmed local officers, who they accused of being in league with the cartel. (They probably were.)
Vigilantes then smashed up the shrines to the Maddest One, toppling the symbols of the narco saint. In one place, they took a bulldozer to rip up a statue of Saint Nazario. They were vanquishing his ghost.
I find Comandante Cinco sitting at a table in the center of Parácuaro days after the vigilantes have taken it. He waves his hand to show a peaceful plaza.
“We have driven the Templars out,” he says. “In a few hours, we did what the police and soldiers couldn’t do in years.”
He has a pertinent point. You have to look at how the security forces failed to get rid of the Templars, despite their blatant narco mansions. The vigilantes made the difference as they come from the same communities, knew who the thugs were and where they were hiding. And they could take the gloves off to fight them.
Later, as the vigilantes call people to the Parácuaro square, an older resident approaches me and uses a metaphor to explain the success of the self-defense squads. He clasps his hands together, interlocking his fingers.
“When the police and army attack, the community does this,” he says, and pushes his fingers closer together.
“But when the self-defense squads come and work with the community, it does this,” he says, and pulls his hands apart, showing the Templars being broken.
Towns fell daily. Within a week, vigilantes stormed the city of New Italy. The attack provoked another fierce battle. Mexico’s nightly newscast led with scenes of crouching vigilantes exchanging gunfire and bleeding bullet victims. For Peña Nieto, denial was no longer an option.
The president sent in the cavalry. As he got plugged into the issue, he finally realized that Michoacán would be a defining battleground in his administration, and sent in even more troops than Calderón had. By late January, twelve thousand soldiers and federal police swarmed on the Hot Land. To lead the operation, he appointed his friend Alfredo Castillo as a federal viceroy to Michoacán.
At first, it wasn’t clear how the incoming troops would treat vigilantes. The self-defense militias were breaking a dozen laws; they had illegal guns, they detained suspects, and they murdered. But with their articulate leaders on TV, the public sympathized with them. There is also a strong case that the rule of law had long vanished in Michoacán and in these conditions, the vigilantes were vindicated.
At first, Peña Nieto and his envoy Castillo didn’t make their position clear. Amid the ambiguity, soldiers arrived in the recently liberated Antunez (home to the mansions of Toucan), and disarmed vigilantes. But within an hour, hundreds of residents surrounded the troops and demanded they give the vigilantes their guns back. They had saved them from the tyranny of the Templars, something the soldiers had never done.
Residents pushed and the soldiers opened fire, killing three, including an eleven-year-old girl. The TV images of her small coffin angered many Mexicans. Not only did the security forces fail to protect people from cartels, they also killed children.
Sensing the mood, the Peña Nieto administration switched its position. It decided that the vigilantes were clearly winning and the security forces would work with them to go after the gangsters.
The federal police had suffered heavy losses at the hands of the Templars, so their officers were happy to coordinate with the self-defense squads. In the new bizarre landscape, you would go through a checkpoint of federal police, drive a hundred yards, and go through a checkpoint of vigilantes.
The Hot Land is always a strange place, but it was especially surreal in the first months of 2014. Barricades zigzagged through the valley and over the border into Guerrero. Teenage kids with machetes and potbellied middle-aged men with Kalashnikovs would ask you for ID. The sight of armed groups became normalized. You presumed they were vigilantes. But then they could be Templars. Or Jalisco New Generation.
Men (and occasional women) stood at barricades day and night watching for enemy snipers. When they came, the bullets would often rain down without them knowing where they were firing from and they would shoot back wildly into the bush.
Despite the bloodshed, the toppling of the Templars unleashed a euphoric atmosphere. Residents who had long lived in fear could talk openly about the rule of the cartel; how they extorted, abused, raped. The vigilantes ransacked narco mansions, drinking at gangsters’ bars and diving into their pools. At the barricades, they would joke and sing, share bottles of beer, and cook dishes in big pots. A favorite was the delicious carne apache—beef marinated in lime juice. And they smoked heinous amounts of weed.
The self-defense movement edged closer to Apatzingán, with villages such as La Huerta on the edge of the city rising up. The deeper vigilantes got into Templar territory, the more Templar gunmen they captured. While they killed or exiled the top Templars, they gave most captured gangsters the option of joining them. They described this action of changing sides from the Templars to the self-defense squads as “flipping.”
At a barricade in La Huerta, the vigilantes show me three Templars who have flipped. They make them do extra work such as hauling sacks of sand to pay for their crimes. But they say they will forgive them once they have redeemed themselves.
I interview one of these “reformed” Templars who describes how he cooked meth, who his boss was, how much he was paid. As he reveals the details, he is nervous at the vigilantes sitting close by fiddling with their rifles. He gives abrupt answers, his eyes flicking around. I realize I am playing a part similar to the interrogators in narco videos, in which hit men will make a captured gangster confess how he worked for a cartel, and what crimes he did. On the videos, this normally ends with a bullet in the brain.
In other towns, I see flipped Templars who are armed and moving freely. In Parácuaro, I meet Manuel, a bulky thirty-two-year-old who cooked meth and sometimes worked as a gunman for the cartel. I interview him at a vigilante barricade on the edge of the city. While he speaks, he is cocking his rifle and eyeing over the trench for the enemy.
Manuel spent most of his life in the United States, and speaks perfect English (he says “fuck” a lot). He is more candid than most. It is not only a few of the vigilantes from Parácuaro who were former Templars, he reveals, but almost all of them.
Manuel went to the U.S. as a small child and grew up in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. While Portland is largely peaceful, it has a gang problem, which Manuel found his way into, joining the Barrio 18 and doing drive-by shootings. However, he survived his wayward youth and became a construction worker, laying drywall for two hundred dollars a day and fathering four children.
“I had a life like any other American. I lived the American dream. But I didn’t realize it could fucking end like that.” Manuel clicks his fingers.
In 2012, he was arrested for hitting his girlfriend. He claims she made it up because he cheated on her. The crime got him deported. Returning to the town of his birth, he found Parácuaro under the bloody rule of the Templars. The local boss was keen to recruit Manuel as he had experience with guns from his gang days.
“Almost everybody here wo
rked for the Templars,” he says. “You were either with them or they could kill you.”
Manuel cooked meth in labs in the nearby countryside for about a thousand dollars a barrel. He also accompanied narcos to collect debts, which got violent. However, when I asked whether he considered himself a member of the Knights Templar, he shakes his head and smiles incredulously. He says he has no time for the Templars’ bizarre beliefs.
“It’s all bullshit,” he says. “Nazario’s balls went to his brains. Dressing like Jesus and shit. La Tuta is one of those educated violent people who loves to fuck with you.”
When the self-defense squads invaded Parácuaro, Manuel joined them.
“I flipped. I had no choice. Now I’m scared the Knights Templar are going to kill this whole fucking town for turning against them.”
However, Manuel hasn’t done too badly out of the uprising. He has a brand-new truck that he “decommissioned” from a Knights Templar boss who fled town. “It’s mine now,” says Manuel, who stands a head taller than his dozen comrades in the trench.
Still, Manuel says he dreams of escaping Michoacán to return to the United States and his former life. He wonders why I, as a Brit, would want to spend any time here.
“I’d love to get out of here and go home. Why would anyone choose to live in a place like this?”
CHAPTER 46
The big prize was Apatzingan. It was the heart of the Templar empire, the controlling town of the Hot Land. If self-defense squads took it, it would be a virtual knockout blow. At the barricades everyone spoke of the inevitable siege on Apatzingan. They all feared (or hoped) it would be a bloodbath.
The problem was that vigilantes struggled to find allies in the city. In most towns, they could find enough residents who wanted vengeance on the Templars. But Apatzingan was where the cartel was born and residents were more loyal. And gangster control had been so strong in Apatzingan for so long that many people could not imagine them leaving and didn’t want to risk speaking out.
Vigilantes eventually found their ally in the unlikeliest of places: the Church.
Father Gregorio Lopez, known as Padre Goyo, met with the vigilante leaders and agreed to support them taking the city. To sway the public mood, he gave sermons calling the Templars sinners and urging people to stand against them. The Templars were furious and threatened to kill him. But Padre Goyo refused to back down. He went on preaching against the cartel from the pulpit, wearing a bulletproof vest as he poured the wine and gave the holy bread. I go to one of his masses in the Apatzingán cathedral and am surprised how sharp his words are.
“I am not scared. I don’t know fear. Fear is for the Templars and the devil,” he tells his flock.
I interview him after mass, trying to find what drives him to take such risks. He is a stocky forty-six-year-old, friendly if with a slightly crazed look. When he describes his life story, I can’t help but see the parallels with that of the Maddest One. Padre Goyo was of a similar generation, born in 1968, also in a rural village with a large family, having ten brothers and sisters. Like the Maddest One, he came to Apatzingán as a teenager, arriving when he was sixteen. While Nazario chose the life of crime, Padre Goyo chose the cloth, finally qualifying as a priest at age twenty-six.
Like the Maddest One, Padre Goyo sees visions. After his mother passed away he says he spoke to her spirit. She told him he had to fight the Templars.
“I saw how they were killing my friends, my brothers, my sheep, and as the pastor I have the obligation to be speaking out. If I do nothing for my sheep I am not a pastor. If a dog bites your children, and you do nothing then you are worse than the dog.”
I ask him what he thinks about Nazario’s faith and he shakes his head. He looks more regretful than angry.
“[Nazario] messes with the Biblical question to gain fame and cohesion. He utilizes God like a weapon, like a lever, like a trampoline. He believes in saints, he believes in God. But it is in a strategic way.”
I ask the padre if he supports the vigilantes’ right to take lives. Surely, the Bible says “thou shalt not kill.” He says there are exceptions.
“In legitimate defense it is valid [to kill]. But first you have to exhaust all the resources, the law, dialogue. The last resort is self-defense.”
He doesn’t carry a gun himself, sticking to words and wearing his bulletproof vest. He also carries a GPS and has contacts in military intelligence following him, he tells me. The Templars call constantly threatening to murder him.
Padre Goyo is inspired by liberation theology, the leftist strain of Catholic teaching. He follows martyrs such as Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who a gunman shot dead during mass, sparking the civil war. Goyo is writing a book called The Hopes of the Hopeless, inspired by Romero’s The Voice of the Voiceless.
Senior Catholic bishops do not openly support Padre Goyo’s stance. But they do not condemn it, which he sees as a tacit nod in his favor. Padre Goyo is actually one of several priests in Mexico who have stood up to cartels. In San Fernando, Tamaulipas, I find a priest who spoke out against gangsters and went with a parishioner to resolve a kidnapping; when the gangsters saw him they beat him with a wooden stick on the lower back as punishment. The most famous of all the gangster-fighting clerics is Padre Alejandro Solalinde, who supports migrants against mass kidnappings by the Zetas. Solalinde has become a national figure and fervent critic of the Mexican government.
It strikes me how these priests—unelected religious representatives—have been better at standing up for their people than politicians, the secular elected democrats. It’s a paradox of Mexico’s malfunctioning democracy.
Padre Goyo’s masses became rallies to overthrow the Templars. Even attending them was risky. But as the gatherings got larger and self-defense squads drew closer, people lost their fear. The padre created a group called CCRISTOS, a Spanish acronym that referred to followers of Christ. He gave them white T-shirts, similar to those of the self-defense squads. But Padre Goyo insisted it was a peaceful movement.
“I don’t have a pact with any cartel or even the self-defense squads,” he tells me. “My only pact is with Christ.”
Nevertheless, he was openly close to leaders such as Hipólito. To test the water, Hipólito and others vigilantes drove into Apatzingán to attend a mass. The vigilantes stood in the church wearing their bulletproof vests and then spoke to the citizens in the square. When vigilantes had tried marching in Apatzingán back in October, Templar gunmen opened fire on them. But on this Sunday, police and soldiers stood by and the air was free of gunshots. The vigilantes saw the moment was right to strike.
The self-defense squads hit Apatzingán at dawn on Saturday, February 8, 2014. They moved simultaneously in five convoys and set up bases around the perimeter of the city. The largest was in the lime market, which became a headquarters of the new power arriving; soon city officials and businessmen would go there to hold quarter with the vigilante leaders.
I sped down from Mexico City with colleagues. As we drove into Apatzingán, we saw the Templars had put narco mantas across bridges threatening the vigilantes. They also made threats on the radio waves of walkie-talkies.
“Self-defense squads. If you keep on advancing we are going to fuck you up (partir su madre),” said a voice, identified as Templar boss Pantera. “We’ll be throwing bombs all over the place … We are not responsible if innocent people die.”
However, when we got to the vigilante bases, we saw they had overwhelming numbers, with some two thousand around the city. In contrast, the Templar army had been rapidly dissolving as their men were killed, ran, or flipped.
The vigilantes held the perimeter through the day, without taking the center of Apatzingán. By nightfall, the Templars had not attacked them and the atmosphere was jubilant. Under the moon, I watched stoned vigilantes clasping their rifles and spontaneously performing a reenactment of the fight against the cartel to guffaws of laughter.
The following morning, the vigilantes made a triumpha
nt drive through the center in a convoy of 120 trucks, all overflowing with gunmen. Soldiers and police stood by. It was a bizarre sight. The security forces seemed more like United Nations peacekeepers than the government.
As the vigilantes consolidated their control, they worked more systematically with the security forces. Vigilantes had ground intelligence the police lacked. When they got addresses of Templars they passed them to federales who went in blasting.
The vigilante information gathering got ugly. I watched them take a terrified teenage girl for interrogation. They questioned some suspects in the Apatzingán cathedral patio. They held others in makeshift prisons in cattle ranches or warehouses. Suspects complained of being tortured. Residents searched for missing family members who had last been seen at the hands of self-defense squads. Maybe these victims were Templars. Maybe they weren’t.
As the Peña Nieto administration worked with vigilantes it was complicit in the torture and disappearances. The vigilantes had effectively become a paramilitary doing the government’s dirty work. Yet it is a tough question as to what Peña Nieto should have done in this extraordinary situation. It would have been madness to move against the vigilantes at this point. Any course was problematic.
While ugly, this combination of security forces and vigilantes hammered the Templars. And they zeroed in on Nazario himself.
The undead narco saint retreated into the highlands of his birth, moving around a triangle of mountains between Apatzingán, Aguililla, and Arteaga. People there still sheltered him, and Nazario loved the wilderness. He moved in hills only mules can travail and switched houses by day or night.
The vigilantes led search parties and “liberated” villages to gradually close the noose. I trek with a squad searching homes.
