A FUPCEG vigilante vehicle bears the slogan: “They could see me dead, but never surrendering nor humiliated”, at the group’s base in Filo de Caballos

What now passes for the law in Xaltianguis, a little town on the road to Acapulco, arrived with a car bomb and butchery. A heavily armed vigilante force took over the town in the Mexican state of Guerrero last month by driving out a rival band, blowing up a car with gas cylinders and cutting up the body of one of the fallen gang members. Residents cowered in their homes or fled down the highway through mountainous tropical scrubland. Police and troops guarding Xaltianguis did nothing.

A shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe is decorated with a Mexican flag on the road leading to Filo de Caballos. Driving the back roads of Guerrero means passing dozens of roadblocks manned by men in civilian clothes with assault rifles.

Top: clothes pegs hang on a line on the roof of a home whose residents fled after heavy fighting in Filo de Caballos. Above: displaced children rest inside an unfinished home in Chichihualco where they have taken refuge after FUPCEG vigilantes took over their towns.

Now, a few hundred metres from the new “community police” base the vigilantes set up, Mexican marines and the state police guard the highway and make patrol sorties through the town. But they have made no attempt to arrest the vigilantes, even though most of them openly carry illegal assault rifles. “We have the town practically bullet-proofed by the government. At the entrances to the town you can see the army, the marines, all levels of government here supporting us,” boasted Daniel Adame, the leader of the United Front of Guerrero Community Police (FUPCEG) group, which took over Xaltianguis.

Students pass FUPCEG vigilantes outside the group’s base in Filo de Caballos.

Left: FUPCEG vigilantes drive past the bullet hole-riddled gate to a home where heavy fighting took place in Filo de Caballos. Right: A local leader waits to meet Salvador Alanis, a FUPCEG strategist and spokesman, inside the group’s base shattered by gunfire in Filo de Caballos.

A FUPCEG vigilante on patrol in Filo de Caballos.

FUPCEG vigilantes on the streets of Xaltianguis.

It is a scene repeated over and over again in southern Mexico: “community police” or “self-defence” groups, often accused of having ties with drug cartels, have proliferated and extended their control over the territory. Critics say rival gangs often infiltrated the ranks of community police forces. And time after time, outnumbered soldiers do not intervene, in part because they are afraid of opening fire on civilians.

Many had expected violence to taper off in Guerrero as synthetic opioids such as fentanyl knocked the bottom out of the opium market that had fed organised crime groups in the state. In fact, homicides in the notoriously violent state dropped by 36% in the first three months of the year. But it appears a new round of violence is starting, pitting warring gangs against vigilante squads fighting over fuel theft, gold mines and routes for precursor chemicals.

Thousands have been displaced by the fighting, and the toxic mix of cartels, hired killers and vigilantes and state forces have essentially neutralised the Mexican military, forcing troops into the role of mere spectators or, worse, hostages.

Daniel Adame, the local FUPCEG leader, displays weapons that he says civilians have been obliged to take up to defend themselves, as his son and bodyguard stands behind him at the force’s base in Xaltianguis.

Adame is a far cry from the vigilante leaders of past years – townsfolk who armed themselves with shotguns and single-shot rifles to defend their towns from drug cartels. The FUPCEG leader is a self-described businessman who owns a lion and exotic birds, and has an expensive AR-15 rifle with a telescopic sight. His son carries a pistol with carved silver handgrips.

He defended the use of the car bomb, saying other groups – such as the rival Union of Towns and Organisations of Guerrero (UPOEG) – also used explosives. He said his group had taken over because the other one was tied to organised crime, an assertion UPOEG tossed back at Adame’s force.

A UPOEG mural at a blocked-off town entrance in Buenavista reads: “They took so much from us that we lost our fear.”

Top: UPOEG’s Comandante Geronimo talks about the force’s struggle to protect Buenavista from cartels and other vigilante groups. Above: UPOEG members solicit change from drivers at a roadblock in Buenavista.

Such groups are increasingly powerful and willing to challenge the armed forces. Salvador Alanis, a strategist and spokesman for the FUPCEG, said the group had as many as 9,000 men under arms in a string of towns it controlled, outnumbering the Mexican army in the state. He also recalled: “One time the army came and fired teargas at women, and we didn’t allow that.”

Salvador Alanis, a FUPCEG strategist and spokesman, in Filo de Caballos.

Left: FUPCEG vigilantes enter a home whose occupants fled after heavy fighting in Filo de Caballos. Right: a FUPCEG vigilante stands guard outside the group’s base in Filo de Caballos.

The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is betting his security strategy on the newly-created National Guard, a sort of militarised police force which is expected to be deployed in Guerrero in a month. But if the guard faces the same limitations the army does, it will immediately be at a disadvantage in states such as Guerrero and Michoacán.

Alanis said: “I’m telling the federal government right now, this could happen to your National Guard, because if one of these guys opens fire it will be a massacre on both sides.” He claimed to have an arrangement with local army commanders in Guerrero to leave his forces alone. “It’s a relationship of tolerance, if not coordination,” he added. “You don’t mess with us, and we don’t mess with you.”

Military police wear GN armbands, the insignia of the new National Guard.

While most of the vigilante forces are recruited from local men, Alanis said his group also employed about 100 gunmen trained to kill with the aim of taking over towns. He called them “a team that comes to destroy”. “They are ready to kill or die for whatever you give them,” he said.

And as it is ever more difficult to distinguish the vigilantes from the cartels, the cartels also are growing bolder. In the Michoacán town of Zamora, the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel paraded through town in May in a convoy of at least two dozen pickups and SUVs, all proudly bearing the cartel’s initials, CJNG, on their doors and sides.

With soldiers standing by as towns are taken over, the conflicts in some areas are becoming almost medieval. Residents of the town of Chichihualco have dug trenches across the highway leading to the FUPCEG stronghold in the village of Filo de Caballos because Alanis has repeatedly threatened to take over their city.

Others have set up roadblocks to defend their towns. Driving the back roads of Guerrero these days means passing dozens of roadblocks manned by men in civilian clothes with assault rifles.

Top: children play on the quiet main street in Filo de Caballo. Above: A woman works in a shop in Filo de Caballos. Residents estimate that about half the town’s population fled after violent clashes and a takeover by FUPCEG vigilantes.

David Barragan, who fled FUPCEG vigilantes, gets by by manning over a government-operated tollbooth on the road leading out of Mexico City towards Guerrero, charging motorists about half the toll and keeping the money.

“Comandante Geronimo” stood by one such bullet-riddled barricade made of sandbags. A member of the UPOEG, he has endured attacks about every two months from FUPCEG to the south and the Ardillos drug gang to the north. Geronimo, who did not want to give his real name for fear of reprisals, explained why there was such heavy fighting for such small, poor towns. “There’s a crisis now in the mountains and the criminal gangs aren’t blockheads,” he said. “They say this [opium] isn’t going to be a business, but the mines are. So I think a month of crisis is coming.”

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The Canadian-owned goldmines that dot the mountains have historically been shaken down for protection payments by gangs. Now gold has been discovered at other spots in the state, raising the prospect that cartels or vigilante groups may want to take up a direct role in the mines.

Others believe the groups want to take control of routes to the seaport of Acapulco to move precursor chemicals now that synthetic opioids have displaced the region’s natural-grown opium poppies. David Barragan, a resident of Los Moros who was forced from his village by the incursion of Alanis’ FUPCEG forces, said: “We thought that once the opium poppy business died out, the violence was going to end.”

Like many residents of the mountains, Barragan long depended on planting an acre or two of poppies to make money. But when prices dropped a couple of years ago, Barragan turned to his stand of avocado trees, the new “green gold” in the mountains of southern Mexico. But now the vigilantes have seized his avocado orchard and are harvesting the fruit he had waited two years to mature.

Barragan, like hundreds of his neighbours and thousands throughout the state, has fled. He said residents would not accept this situation for much longer. “The National Guard is what we most need up here, and have been waiting for, but if it doesn’t work we are going to take other measures.” He said many of his neighbours were thinking of getting guns.