Mexico: Guerrero’s Indigenous Community Police and Self-defense Groups
Indignant over the police and government’s inability or unwillingness to reduce violent drug-related crimes, citizens in Mexico’s rural, mostly indigenous, southwestern state of Guerrero have (once again) organized armed self-defense groups to ensure their own public safety and security. The spark that ignited the recent wave of dozens of communities to declare the formation of their own policing groups occurred on January 6, 2013 with the kidnapping of a local community leader in the municipality of Ayutla de los Libres, in the region known as the Costa Chica.
