APATZINGAN, Mexico—Fed up with drug cartel demands for extortion payments, lime-grower Hipólito Mora picked up an old shotgun and led his neighbors in a vigilante uprising in 2013.
After helping bring down the Knights Templar cartel, twice landing in jail, and losing his own son to violence, the 59-year-old man now is leading a different sort of campaign by running for Congress in Mexico’s midterm elections on Sunday.
In his familiar wire-rimmed glasses, white Panama hat, and graying beard, Mora is rallying supporters in southern Michoacán to harness the energy behind the vigilante uprising and turn it into political power.
“Two years and three months ago we began this fight, a fight because no one could work anymore. All sorts of jobs were controlled by the Knights Templar,” he told about 50 people gathered on a soccer field in Apatzingán, some 200 miles (335 kilometers) west of Mexico City.
“I entered politics for you, just as I started the armed group—fighting because it pained me to see what was happening.”
Vigilantes
Criminal gangs, many of them fragments of cartels broken up by arrests, continue to grip Michoacán, a prime area for drug trafficking with its 135 miles (217 kilometers) of Pacific coastline, including one of Latin America’s largest ports, and its thick folds of lush mountains. As for the vigilantes, known locally as self-defense groups, many have been regularized into “Rural Police” forces recognized by the federal government.
The government considers vigilante forces such as the group once led by Mora to be disbanded. But armed self-defense patrols still are de-facto rulers in pockets of Mexico.
Officials promise to ensure peace for Sunday’s vote, which will see 500 congressional representatives elected, along with governors of nine states and hundreds of mayors.
But tension has heated up with activists threatening to block voting in neighboring Guerrero, where drug violence is pervasive, and farther south in Oaxaca, where a radical teachers union is demanding repeal of federal educational reforms. Already, the run-up to Sunday’s vote has been marred by bloodshed, with three candidates and one would-be candidate gunned down, and thousands of ballots stolen and burned.
Enrique Hernandez, another former vigilante leader, was shot to death in May during a rally for his mayoral campaign in Yurécuaro, on Michoacán’s border with Jalisco state—an area that has seen several recent eruptions of violence between Mexican forces and the powerful New Generation Jalisco cartel.
