Religion

cbayer

(146,218 posts) Tue Nov 18, 2014, 12:13 PM Nov 2014

Mexico’s Holy Warrior Against the Cartels

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/18/mexico-s-holy-warrior-against-the-cartels.html

11.18.14

Jason McGahan

El Universal/ZUMAPRESS.com

Padre Goyo, with his clerical collar and his bulletproof vest, is an icon for those fighting drugs and corruption. But some in the church think he goes too far.

MORELIA, Mexico—If you want to know about the Mexican priest Padre Gregorio López, first of all you need to know that his parish is located in the small city of Apatzingán, at the heart of a region in southern Mexico known as a fiefdom of the Knights Templar drug cartel. Then you need to know that he considers it his religious obligation to drive the cartel out of the city and out of the state of Michoacán.

The lengths to which the padre is willing to go to achieve that end have carried his reputation far beyond the rough-and-tumble region known as Tierra Caliente, so named for an average annual temperature that rounds down to 95 degrees.

Land theft, the extortion of farmers, and the rise in kidnappings and murders were grievances left to simmer for years in the countryside. A year ago, in the fall of 2013, the frustration boiled over. Farming communities across the region rose up in arms, in some cases with guns and four-wheel-drive vehicles more in keeping with the army or a drug cartel than poor farmers.

In January, the president of Mexico put the law enforcement of Michoacán in trusteeship and a federal commission, once in place, began exerting pressure on the leaders of the self-defense movement to disarm and incorporate their ranks into a new rural police force. Most of the groups obliged. But the most authoritative spokesman for the movement, a surgeon named José Manuel Mireles, refused and continued to rally forces until the commission had him and 80 of his followers arrested in June for carrying unlicensed firearms.

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