Los Angeles Times
By Tracy Wilkinson
June 11, 2013
COALCOMAN, Mexico — Rafael Garcia slaps the oversize wooden desk where he sits, one of the last mayors still in office in this region of Mexican farm country known as Tierra Caliente — hot land.
Mayors from a couple of the nearest towns fled with their drug-cartel pals, people here say, when locals took up arms against them.
But at Garcia's City Hall, the facade is festooned with hand-lettered signs supporting local gunmen who challenged the cartel, loosely referred to as community "self-defense" guards, comunitarios. Several cities in Tierra Caliente are now patrolled by such groups, whose members, often masked, man checkpoints and pull over passing vehicles for inspection. They have reached a kind of tense coexistence with the army, which moved in a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to bring order. Read more.
The MexicoBlog of the Americas Program, a fiscally sponsored program of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is written by Laura Carlsen. I monitor and analyze international press on Mexico, with a focus on security, immigration, human rights and social movements for peace and justice, from a feminist perspective. And sometimes I simply muse.
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