Mexico cartel dominates, torches western state, kepps killing & killing & killing..

[Too_Many_Tools]

Send the drones after those fucking spic drug dealers. Let's
see if they go after Obama!

Laugh! Laugh! Laugh!

LA RUANA, Mexico �

The farm state of Michoacan is burning. A drug cartel that takes
its name from an ancient monastic order has set fire to lumber
yards, packing plants and passenger buses in a medieval-like
reign of terror.

The Knights Templar cartel is extorting protection payments from
cattlemen, lime growers and businesses such as butchers,
prompting some communities to fight back, taking up arms in
vigilante patrols.

Lime picker Alejandro Ayala chose to seek help from the law
instead. After the cartel forced him out of work by shutting
down fruit warehouses, he and several dozen co-workers, escorted
by Federal Police, met on April 10 with then-state Interior
Secretary Jesus Reyna, now the acting governor of the state in
western Mexico.

The 41-year-old father of two only wanted to get back to work,
said his wife, Martha Elena Murguia Morales.

But, as often, the cartel responded before the government did.

On the way back, his convoy was ambushed, twice. Ayala and nine
others were killed.

"I called him after the first one, and he said, `They shot at
us, but I'm OK,'" Murguia Morales said. "Then I called him
again, and he didn't answer."

Help finally arrived Sunday when thousands of soldiers rolled in
to restore order. The government of President Enrique Pena Nieto
says troops will stay in Michoacan until every citizen lives in
peace. But the offensive, headed by Secretary of Defense
Salvador Cienfuegos, looks a lot like failed operations launched
previously by former President Felipe Calderon, who started his
first assault on organized crime in Michoacan shortly after
taking office in late 2006.

Calderon was trying to stop drug cartels from morphing into
mafias controlling all segments of society. But that's exactly
what has happened, as they maintain country roads, control the
local economy and mete out justice for common crimes.

In the Tierra Caliente, a remote agricultural region, fire has
been a favored weapon of the cartel. On the highway between
Coalcoman and La Ruana, the ruins of three sawmills torched by
the cartel still smoldered this week.

The owners reportedly had failed to pay protection fees of 120
pesos (about $10) for every cubic meter of wood they sold, the
equivalent of about 10 cents for every two-by-four board.

The Knights Templar also demands that avocado growers pay 2,000
pesos (about $160) per hectare of trees. Avocado warehouses were
set afire this month by armed men.

The heart of a conflict where a mafia openly rules and the
government is largely absent is nowhere more evident than in the
lime groves that cover the hot, hilly plains, miles and miles of
trees with the fruit yellowing and falling into uncollected
heaps on the ground.

Mexico is the world's largest producer of limes, according to
the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 2 million tons in
2012. Much of its exports go to the United States, and Michoacan
contributes a large share of that: nearly 475,000 tons of the
fruit last year, half from the Tierra Caliente.

It sometimes seems like everything in Mexico, from tacos to
potato chips to beer, gets a squeeze of lime.

By late last year, the cartel wasn't just extorting money from
lime growers and packers. It had started charging per-box
payments from lime pickers, who make only $10 to $15 per day
laboring under the scorching sun.

With officials doing nothing to help, self-defense groups
started to spring up in February to fight back. Heavily armed
men in masks and baseball caps began manning barricades along
highways and patrolling the countryside, sometimes openly
battling the cartel. Last month

Then the cartel shut the warehouses, forbidding brokers to buy
limes and cutting off work for the pickers who had revolted.

Straw-hatted fruit broker Carlos Torres Chavez watched on
Tuesday as thousands of fresh green limes poured down the chutes
from his plant's giant hoppers into a 37-ton truck for shipment
to a processing mill. It was his first day open in two months,
thanks to the arrival of the army.

Torres Chavez sells to mills that make lime oil. He usually gets
yellow, overripe, second-rate fruit.

But because of the growers' desperation to make money, they were
selling him fresh green limes for a peso per kilogram (8 cents
per pound), a third of what the fruit is normally worth.

"This is a waste. These are good limes, they can be eaten. They
shouldn't be going to the mill," said Domingo Mora, 54, as he
picked up one of the limes sifting through the hoppers.

Mora's 24-year-old son, Daniel Mora Torres, was arrested in
March along with 50 other young men from the La Ruana self-
defense force and was sent to a prison in northern Mexico.

Authorities accused them of carrying banned assault rifles, and
said some had links to a rival cartel, Jalisco Nueva Generation,
which they deny. The federal government sees both the self-
defense forces and the cartel as dangerous enemies.

Mora says his son is just a lime picker who couldn't work to
feed his family after the Knights Templar banned the lime sales.

Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the federal government recently
declared a lime emergency because prices had doubled to about 70
cents a pound (18 pesos per kilogram). For a fruit so central to
Mexican cuisine, it was a crisis.

The government announced last week it would tackle the shortage
by importing limes from Brazil. The government attributed the
local scarcity to crop pests and "seasonal fluctuations" in
production.

Sergio Ramirez, president of a lime trade group called Sistema
Producto Limon, insisted there is no shortage and blamed the
high prices on greedy fruit dealers and government bungling. His
explanation doesn't play in the Tierra Caliente.

"Isn't it ironic, Mexico is going to import limes from Brazil,
because there isn't enough supply?" asked a rancher wearing a
baseball cap and leaning back into his chair at the headquarters
of the local self-defense group in Tepalcatepec. "Here, the
limes are falling to the ground, because the lords of the
Knights Templar won't let them be sold."

The rancher, who like most of the vigilantes won't give his name
for fear of reprisal, knows the price of living under the rule
of the gang. They used to demand 800 to 1,000 pesos (up to $80)
in protection money for each head of cattle he owned, about
equal to any profit he would make from selling them.

The Mexican army was met with cheers when it arrived in La Ruana
on Monday night. Federal Interior Secretary Miguel Osorio Chong
promised that the offensive this time would have better
coordination, cooperation and intelligence to be successful.

But federal forces up against a deeply rooted local mafia that,
with at least a decade of state and local government tolerance,
exerts almost governmental power.

The last time the federal government truly went after the
cartel, then known as La Familia, was in 2010. Federal Police
killed leader Nazario Moreno Gonzalez in a gunbattle and
firefights followed for weeks in dozens of spots. La Familia's
leadership fell apart, but one branch of the cartel evolved into
the Knights Templar, which has consolidated control.

The cartel now operates relatively openly. A man resembling its
leader, Servando "La Tuta" Gomez Martinez, recently appeared on
YouTube, calling on the federal government to do its job and
saying the vigilantes were men sent by rival cartels from
outside of Michoacan.

He has regularly sent messages depicting the Knights Templar as
home-grown Robin Hoods who take from the rich, give to the poor
and defend the state against other gangs.

The cartel even built public, roadside chapels to its fallen
leader, "St. Nazario," which some of the vigilantes destroyed.

And it can draw crowds of supporters, either by threat,
persuasion or payment, in cities such as Apatzingan, where
hundreds of people have rallied to condemn the self-defense
squads.

Many of the vigilante squads disappeared this week with the
arrival of the army, though they vow to take up arms again as
soon as the soldiers leave. But the patrols continued in the
town of Buenavista, where one self-defense guard, a square-jawed
young lime picker in a straw hat, carried a 16-gauge shotgun at
a checkpoint. He described the cartel this way:

"It's like a monster with a thousand arms, that wants to control
everything, the way you live, the way you think," said the young
patrolman. "You cut off one arm, it grows another."

http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021033614_apltdrugwarm
exico.html?prmid=obinsource