One of the last leaders of Mexico’s anti-gang citizens’ movement was buried on Saturday alongside two of his faithful followers, and any hope of reviving armed civilian resistance to drug cartels probably died with them.
“Self-defense” vigilante leader Hipolito Mora had long since ceased to pose an armed threat to the cartel that dominates western Mexico’s Michoacan state, as was clear from the overwhelming, deadly, multipoint ambush in which he and three followers were slain on Thursday.
While some angry relatives talked of reviving the 2013-2014 armed farmers’ movement that kicked out one cartel — only to see it replaced by others — many doubted that heroic, tragic chapter could ever be repeated.
Photo: AP
“I think it’s not a question of reviving the past,” said the Reverend Gilberto Vergara, one of the priests who officiated the funeral Mass for Mora and his followers, Calixto Alvarez and Roberto Naranjo. The third follower was buried elsewhere.
“The circumstances have changed, they’re different, and we saw how everything ended,” he said.
Mora had said that the 2013 movement, in which farmers and ranchers banded together to resist constant threats and extortion from the Knights Templar cartel, wound up infiltrated by members of other drug gangs.
The cartel now dominating the state, alternately called the Viagras or the United Cartels, “is worse than the ones who were here before,” said Mora’s brother, Guadalupe Mora Chavez.
“If the government and [Michoacan Governor Alfredo Ramirez] Bedolla don’t do something, there are possibilities the people will rise up in arms again,” the brother said.
Most at Mora’s wake were too afraid of cartel retaliation even to have their names appear in print.
“He looked out for his town, for his people, and that is something none of us is going to do,” his sister, Olivia Mora, said in a tearful address in front of his coffin.
“We all think first about our own families,” she said. “None of us are going to have the courage to do what he did.”
“I hope that something remains,” another of Hipolito Mora’s weeping female relatives said. “I hope his voice hasn’t been silenced.”
Hipolito Mora always spoke out against the cartels’ extortion of local farmers and lime growers, even after his hundreds of followers had been reduced to a handful.
The female relative, who asked that her name not be used, said the extortion has grown so bad that some growers are giving up their businesses, and locals sometimes are forced to pay double the price for basic goods.
The power of the drug cartels has only grown over the past decade. The Reverend Gregorio Lopez, a priest who was not present at the funeral, said that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s policy of not confronting the cartels has allowed them to grow.
“The ‘hugs not bullets’ policy has been the perfect fertilizer for growing drug cartels across the country,” he said.
The overwhelming power of the cartels was visible in the bullet holes in the walls where Hipolito Mora and his bodyguards died.
The Michoacan state prosecutors’ office said that unidentified shooters cut off his vehicle and his bodyguards’ pickup truck on a street in La Ruana, Hipolito Mora’s hometown, then riddled his vehicle with bullets and set it on fire.
Residents of La Ruana, in the torrid agricultural belt of western Michoacan, turned out by the hundreds for the funeral.
At the local cemetery, Hipolito Mora and his two followers were laid to rest to the tune of the Joan Sebastian corrido ballad The General.
The lyrics go: “I have been a general a long time, and even though I am wounded, I never forget about my troops and they haven’t buried me yet.”
The cartels seem intent on squelching even nonviolent resistance.
“The narcos and the drug cartels are always going to try to get rid of anything that gets in their way,” Vergara said.
The time for armed self-defense movements is past, he said.
“Guns don’t help us, civilians shouldn’t carry guns,” Vergara said. “I think it is up to the government to do their duty.”
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