Drafting
BBC News World
“I don’t have much time left here (…) I don’t make it to Christmas alive.”
The words were spoken just a few weeks ago by Hipólito Mora, the controversial Mexican landowner who a decade ago promoted the creation of civilian self-defense groups to confront the drug traffickers who control the western part of the country.
His prediction came true this Thursday, June 29, when he was ambushed by several armed individuals while traveling in his armored truck.
Despite the fact that the authorities have barely begun the investigations, the local media have attributed the murder of Mora and three of his bodyguards to a criminal gang called Los Viagras.
The events occurred in the town of La Ruana, a small town in the Michoacán municipality of Buenaventura, where the landowner was born 68 years ago and where he lived most of his life.
A “crazy” fed up with extortion
In 2013 Mora, together with other agricultural producers and local businessmen, created armed groups, which confronted the cartel known as Los Caballeros Templarios.
The criminal group gained control of what is known as “Tierra Caliente” by imposing curfews and extorting money from producers and day laborers and forcing several of them to leave the area, under threat of death.
At that time, Mexico was experiencing the throes of the “war on drugs” launched by President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), which caused an increase in violence in the country.
“I am not very well of my mental capacities”he admitted in an interview with Televisa, in which he attributed his decision to take justice on his own to the inaction of the authorities and the weariness of seeing his neighbors suffer from the actions of criminals.
“I was angry at them (anger at criminals), to see how they abused the nobility people. People did not want problems, they wanted to work at ease, ”he narrated and attributed to this the enthusiasm that the initiative initially obtained from him.
“Poor people followed me. No fucking rich approached the movement, they stayed in their homes, ”he said.
However, the disappeared landowner later admitted that he himself was affected by the action of criminals, because in 2013 some criminals prevented one of his sons from harvesting on his land; and, for this reason, he communicated with other leaders in the area to launch their resistance against the drug traffickers.
A year later, his son died in an armed confrontation with drug traffickers.
hero or villain
Despite the fact that Mora presented himself as a champion against crime, he himself had his problems with the law. The newspaper Reforma revealed that the founder of the self-defense groups He was in jail twice in the United States for drug possession and trafficking.
The first of these was in June 1989, when he was sentenced to four years in prison. Subsequently, in 1993 he was captured again in US territory for the same crime and two years later he was deported to Mexico.
Mora’s crusade against crime quickly landed him in trouble. In 2014 he was arrested for allegedly participating in the murder of two members of another armed civilian group and was later accused of being linked to in the death to ten people. However, he ended up being released months later.
“The illegal armed self-defense movement (…) did not bring anything positive to the State,” said the governor of Michoacán, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, when reacting to the death of the landowner.
In recent years, Mora has admitted that his creation did not work as expected, although he did not assume any responsibility.
“I had to see the process of the self-defense groups, I am the true founder here in Tierra Caliente, later more self-defense leaders emerged, but some leaders let the vigilante groups fill up with pure criminals and they put on the self-defense shirt, that’s why it was lost ”, he declared in 2020.
However, until the end of his days he defended the need to combat criminal groups in all possible ways.
“I think we need some Bukeles here in Mexico. Let whoever be upset, we need someone to put order. We are fed up with working for other people, ”she declared to El Heraldo just a few days ago.
frustrated race
Mora tried to take his ideas to the institutions, although without much success.
In 2015, he accepted the nomination of Movimiento Ciudadano to run for the position of federal deputy for District XII, corresponding to Apatzingán. So, dressed in a cowboy hat and bulletproof vest, the lemon grower campaigned, but failed to reach Congress.
And in 2020 he ran for the position of Governor of Michoacan.
“I want to be governor (…) to help the citizens and not to plunder the state. I want to be an example in politics, so that those who have been and who are in the government learn how and for whom to work, ”he said after registering his candidacy.
However, on that occasion the polls did not favor him either.
In the last year Mora had suffered two attacks, but he had managed to escape unscathed from both. The same fate did not accompany him on June 29.
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