“Michoacán, and especially its western mountainous region, has suffered persistent problems of violence and perhaps a more persistent problem with the state’s weak response to violence,” said Matthew C. Ingram, an assistant professor at the University at Albany who studies Mexico’s justice institutions. “If the state cannot or will not do it, then, in short, ordinary citizens take it upon themselves to do it.”

Or, as the Rev. Antonio Mendoza, the Roman Catholic priest who presided over the funeral of the two victims here on Wednesday, put it, “the solution is legality and rule-of-law reforms.”

“Until we have them,” he added, “people will take justice into their own hands.”

It was clear that the attempt by the government to reassert authority would come at best in fits and starts, offering little interference with the groups in some towns where they agreed to put down or at least hide their weapons, and backing off where it was not welcome. Late Wednesday, the federal government named a commissioner to direct its effort in Michoacán. In Apatzingán, a small city that the vigilantes had vowed to seize because they see it as the stronghold of the Knights Templar drug ring, federal police officers kept a heavy presence. Still, a pharmacy had been burned under suspicious circumstances, and several businesses had closed under threat by the Knights Templar, local reporters said.

Late Wednesday, the government announced the arrest of two men it called leaders of the Knights Templar, including Joaquín Negrete, who is accused of 11 murders in the region. But members of the self-defense groups told local media that the men were not top leaders and had no plans to lay down their arms.

At a meeting Wednesday night among the groups, they agreed to seek a way to work together with the federal police and little by little give up their arms, Estanislao Beltran, a spokesman for the group, told reporters afterward, according to El Universal, a newspaper.

Here in Antúnez, there were no signs of federal police officers or soldiers, and certainly no disarmament. And residents would not have it any other way.