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“We’ve reached the gates of Hell,” he tells a crowd in the square of his hometown, Tepalcatepec. “Now it’s time to defend ourselves.”

Mireles granted Heineman unlimited access, the latter employing a lightweight camera – and run-and-gun style – to capture the Autodefensas on missions.

The film begins, though, with a scene encapsulating the savagery they’re up against: the burial of a group of young children, who’d had their feet bound and heads smashed against rocks after their father (a farmer) failed to pay the weekly extortion fee, demanded of businesses across the state.

Illegal sales of cocaine and methamphetamine to the U.S. are worth around pounds 20 billion a year, and it’s a market Mexico’s cartels will stop at nothing to protect. (Some 70,000 people died in drug-related violence between 2006 and 2013.) Yet, the Knights Templar, like cartels elsewhere in Mexico, have diversified beyond the production and distribution of drugs into other areas too: hijacking Michoacan’s lucrative trade in both lime and avocado, for instance.

Mireles started to speak out three years ago. A gifted orator who attacked the corruption of local government and police in the face of narco oppression, he struck a chord with ordinary citizens. Harnessing people’s anger and resentment, he assembled a motley crew of lumberjacks, fruit pickers and other folk, who then set about storming drug labs and fighting cartel members.

Before long, the Autodefensas had grabbed de facto control not just of Tepalcatepec but 28 other municipalities in Michoacan too, setting up citizen councils in each. This amounted to about a third of one of the most hotly contested states in the country.