Hipólito Mora, the farmer and self-defence leader who confronted drug cartels, murdered in Michoacán state
Mora led an uprising against a predatory drug cartel in 2014, inspiring other communities to rise up. But his actions and outspokenness eventually cost him his life in a region controlled by cartels
Lime grower Hipólito Mora led a 2014 uprising of self-defence forces in western Michoacán state as fed up farmers and villagers ran off a marauding drug cartel, which was extorting them into extinction.
He lived under threat ever since in the town of La Ruana – where he and three of his bodyguards were assassinated June 29 in an attack reverberating across Mexico and showing the stubborn persistence of criminal groups’ control over conflictive corners of the country.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, predictably blamed the crime on his predecessors, including former president Felipe Calderón, who sent soldiers into Michoacán to stamp out the cartels after taking office in December 2006.
The blame came in spite of the fact AMLO assumed office four and a half years ago. In the process, the president once again explained away an atrocity, while expressing more scorn for his political rivals than the assailants, vanishingly little empathy for the victims and seemingly no outrage over the act itself. He defiantly insisted the day after Mora’s murder:
“This is a remnant of the violence that was sponsored and allowed by the government. Remember that there was a narco-state in Mexico during the government of Felipe Calderón.”
AMLO once again re-litigated the close 2006 election, which he lost to Calderón in a contest the current president never conceded. He continued:
“We mustn’t forget that in a very irresponsible and inhuman way Felipe Calderón precisely declared war in Michoacán. … It was one of his first acts of government, badly advised, wanting to get along well with international organizations, foreign agencies, searching for legitimacy because he stole the presidency. So he foolishly kicked a hornets nest.”
Violence convulses Mexico
The slaying of Hipólito Mora was but one of a spate of atrocities convulsing Mexico in recent weeks. Other atrocities included:
Sixteen Chiapas state citizen protection secretariat employees kidnapped while travelling on a highway in broad daylight to force the resignation of senior government officials. The employees were released after being held for three days in an area without cellular service. The kidnapping came as conflict broke out between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and Sinaloa Cartel, displacing thousands from a municipality on the Guatemalan border, Frontera Comalapa, as people fled to avoid being forcibly recruited.
A car bomb exploding in the central city of Celaya, injuring 10 national guard members. Anti-crime group Causa en Común reports 42 police officers have been killed in Guanajuato state so far this year.
A drug cartel, believed to be La Familia Michoacana, left body parts strewn around the city of Toluca, capital of Mexico state – where the cartel has run extortion rackets in rural regions, impeded political campaigns during election season and has carried out lethal attacks on police.
A collective of families searching for their missing kin in the Guadalajara area say an anonymous call led them to the discovery of clandestine graves containing at least 20 bodies. The group expects that number to climb to as many as 50 bodies as the search continues, according to news outlet Milenio. The state of Jalisco, home to Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, leads the country in missing persons with 14,918 disappearances, according to the National Search Commission.
The body of journalist Luis Martín Sánchez Iñiguez was discovered Saturday in the western state of Nayarit with signs of violence, three days after he was reported missing. Two other media workers were also reported missing, though one has been found alive. In April, press freedom organization Article 19 reported an 85% rise in violence against journalists during AMLO’s term, with at least 37 journalists murdered.
AMLO to kidnappers: I’m going to tell your parents
AMLO responded to the case of the 16 kidnapped employees with an example of his hugs not bullets security policy, saying at his morning press conference:
“It’s best that they free them. If not, I’m going to tell their parents and their grandparents.”
He then showed off a talking doll – the latest twist on the many “AMLitos,” AMLO plush toys with a characteristic bucktoothed grin, which are produced informally and sold at political rallies and near the Palacio Nacional. The doll repeats some of AMLO’s most famous phrases, which fed his popularity during his years of campaigning and the early part of his presidency. It also distracted press and social media attention from the comments on the Chiapas kidnapping.
The president celebrates while Mexico burns
Amid the violence, AMLO convened his followers to the Zócalo in central Mexico City for a July 1 celebration of the fifth anniversary of his election victory. The event – filled with acarreados (people drawn or coerced to attend in exchange for food and a few pesos) – featured a familiar AMLO speech on his version of morals and values having magically changed Mexico since his arrival in office:
“Little by little, among all of us planting the flag of Mexican humanism, we were promoting a change of mentality that is consolidated in the acts of a government guided by ideals and principles, honest and promoters of social justice.”
He spoke vanishingly of insecurity, insisting: “There is justice and social tranquility and we are advancing toward the eradication of violence. We’re all going to achieve it. ¡Me canso ganso!” – fishing with one of his vintage lines. (Me cano ganso roughly translates as “You betcha!”)
Back in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, where Mora had been murdered days earlier, the bishop of Apatzingán, Mons. Cristóbal Asencio García sounded a dissonant note in his Sunday homily. He said the day after the president’s event:
“He promised us that his main objective was to make peace and I say: Instead of having festively celebrated in the Zócalo, why not decree a day of mourning, of national sorrow – not only for the faithful of the diocese who have lost their lives, rather for many of our brothers in Mexico. It’s recognizing that in our country there is more violence than five years ago.
AMLO responded poorly to the bishop’s admonishment – as he has with other Catholic clergy such as the churchmen calling for a change in security strategy after the slayings of two Jesuits one year ago. He proceeded to lecture the bishop on Christianity:
“There are times when the church hierarchy has more sympathy for the powerful, for the rich, very contrary to sentiment, to the essence of Christianity, because Jesus Christ was always in favour of the poor.”
The MORENA governor of Michoacán doubled down on AMLO’s claims – common in the country, where MORENA underlings take their cues from the president and indulge his response to accusations of: I know your but what I? –accusing priests in the Tierra Caliente region of acting in cahoots with organized crime. Governor Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla alleged:
“They criticize the state, they attack it, but they cover up those generating violence and later become spokesmen for criminal groups. … If they want to engage in politics, then they should take off their cassocks. … Remember that the bishop and priests promoted self-defence forces (autodefensas) at the time.”
The governor referenced the 2014 uprising in which priests lent spiritual support to the autodefensas. (See further down.) The then-bishop was especially outspoken, too. One outspoken priest in the region, Gregorio López – Padre Goyo – lambasted the governor in a video, calling him “a liar because you were saying everything was under control.” His tirade continued:
“Everything is under the control of organized crime. You have a pact with criminal groups, you’re responsible for what is happening. You promised to come and fight criminal groups without distinction and that hasn’t happened.”
National Guard Absence
One the morning that Mora was killed, press accounts say he left his home at 8 a.m. to work in his lime groves. He travelled with three police officers assigned as bodyguards. According to a timeline published in the newspaper Reforma, National Guard members stationed in La Ruana departed at 8:30 a.m., leaving their installations unmanned.
At 9 a.m., Guadalupe Mora, Hipólito’s brother, contacted him to say three vehicles with gunmen were spotted in town. Guadalupe subsequently looked over the guard base walls from his own home and saw no one there, according to the Associated Press.
Mora was travelling back to his home at 11:55 a.m., when he was attacked by at least 25 gunmen, according to Michoacán investigators. The assailants carried .50 calibre weapons, which pierced Mora’s bulletproof SUV, media reports said. At least 1,000 shell casings were collected at the scene. Soldiers didn’t arrive at the scene until at least an hour after the attack. Guadalupe Mora told the AP:
The soldiers had left the base early Thursday and did not arrive at the scene until after the attack, which lasted nearly an hour, he alleged. He does not think it was coincidence.
“They left in agreement with them (the attackers) so that they could come and kill them. The townspeople threw buckets of water to put out (the fire) and (the troops) didn’t arrive.”
Michoacán morass
Priests in the Diocese of Apatzingán have voiced similar frustrations at federal and state inaction. This newsletter reported last year:
“A priest in the timber-cutting community of Coalcomán issued an open letter in August 2021 questioning why soldiers wouldn’t intervene, when a barracks had been built there within the past decade.”
Guadalupe Mora accused a local drug cartel known as Los Viagras of being behind the attack on his brother, alleging they “knew the soldiers weren’t there,” news magazine Proceso reported.
The Tierra Caliente region, called “hell’s anteroom,” for its scorching heat, has a long history of illicit activities, and been beset by violence in recent years as the CJNG has made incursions from neighbouring Jalisco state into a strategically important area. The CJNG has been rebuffed by a coalition of cartels and autodefensas known as Carteles Unidos – with the latter receiving support from the military, according to observers. The AP reported:
“Mora complained the federal government had been fighting an incursion by the Jalisco cartel into the state, but had done little to combat the homegrown cartels. ‘They have to fight all the cartels, not just one,’ Mora said.
Mora’s criticism was “spot on,” noted Falko Ernst, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, who said the government’s strategy has been “to team up with the Carteles Unidos and push the Jalisco Cartel offensive back.”
Self-defence leader
Hipólito Mora came to prominence in 2014, when he led an uprising of villagers in La Ruana. Fed up residents across Michoacán followed suit as the Knight Templar cartel’s extortion was so suffocating that it even collected a cut of the fees for using public toilets.
The author of this newsletter interviewed a priest involved with Mora in 2013, when clandestine meetings were held to plan the formation of an autodefensa. “We met without the community knowing what we were planning,” said Father Andrés Larios, parish priest in La Ruana at the time. He continued:
“Only a few days before (the uprising) at mass, I told people what we were going to do. Every man of good character over the age of 14, along with Hipólito, would start the uprising. Children, women and the elderly would be praying in the parish and the warning of the uprising was the ringing of bells and (shooting off) sky rockets.”
The uprisings proved effective – in the beginning – as it called attention to the security issue, which then-president Enrique Peña Nieto was treating as a public relations problem as he pushed an agenda of economic reforms. Eventually, however, Peña Nieto designated a commissioner for Michoacán – a de facto governor, critics said – who co opted the autodefensas by pinning badges on them as a new police force. They included forces whose leaders were known narcos and ranks were swollen with unsavoury characters.
Larios remains a sympathetic to the autodefensas and skeptical of the attempt to co-opt them, telling Catholic News Service in 2015:
“These people, without weapons or much know-how, were able to pacify their towns and get rid of the narcos. Why couldn't the government do this? The only answer is corruption and collusion.”
Little has improved since then, Larios said:
“Now the constant displacements of the communities are worse than before.
“Previously, they charged them extortion, same as now. But now run them off and even throw them out of their own homes, threatening that if they don’t leave they will kill them.”
FENTANYL CONSUMPTION COMMON IN BAJA, CONTRARY TO AMLO’S CLAIMS
AMLO often insists Mexico has no fentanyl crisis – or consumption for that matter – calling it a U.S. problem, which he’s blamed on parents not hugging their children and family disintegration (while claiming Mexico’s supposedly strong families and ancestral culture and values keeps addiction at bay.)
But a Los Angeles Times investigation in the border city of Mexicali tells another story.
In its investigation, the Times reported on a testing initiative at the Mexicali morgue, which found fentanyl in 23% of the 1,100 bodies brought to the facility. As a comparison, the times noted: “In Los Angeles County, an estimated 28% of the 7,137 bodies the medical examiner tested for the drug last year came up positive.”
The report said of the Mexicali numbers:
“It is believed to be the first study of its kind in a nation where medical examiners have traditionally not done toxicology testing. … And it stands in stark contrast to the country’s official statistics, which show that 184 people received treatment for addiction to the drug nationwide in 2021.”
AMLO has attributed U.S. interest in the fentanyl issue – and talk in Republican circles of intervention in Mexico to deal with it – to politicking ahead of the 2024 election. He has also played along with Chinese statements that it has no knowledge of fentanyl precursors arriving in Mexico to be made into fentanyl for export in clandestine labs.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington repeated that line again, saying in what it labeled a “fact sheet”:
“The U.S. continues to make false accusations of ‘Chinese chemicals are flowing into Mexico to make fentanyl and then been smuggled into the U.S.’ However, China has never received any report or data from Mexico on the use of Chinese precursor chemicals for drug production in this country, nor has the U.S. provided any factual grounds about the flow of Chinese chemicals into Mexico for fentanyl production.”
Former Mexican ambassador Jorge Guajardo disputed those claims, saying in a tweet: