Mexican Citizens Proclaim Right to Self-Defense

5/29/2014

Those living in drug infested, cartel-run  areas of Mexico plead for the right most of us take for granted. The right to protect our loved ones, our interests and ourselves. One needs look no farther than our southern neighbor to see the hell they suffer getting it back. Proving yet again, guns save lives!

MEXICO CITY – Representatives of Mexican civil society gathered Wednesday to proclaim citizens’ right to defend themselves amid chronic government inaction in the face of violence by organized crime. “We appeal to civil society to speak out in favor of security and protection, to declare themselves as members of unarmed militias,” the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, a prominent advocate for migrants, said at the first National Encounter of Citizen Self-Defense Groups. He urged Mexicans to adorn their homes with a broom attached to a green ribbon as a “symbol of confidence in the defense of civil society.” “Since the government hasn’t done it, we can do it. We have the capacity to clean up Mexico as (the western state of) Michoacan has done,” the priest said. In February 2013, business owners and other community leaders in Michoacan organized armed self-defense groups to battle the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) drug cartel, which supplements its narco-profits with lucrative sidelines in extortion and kidnapping. Substantial portions of Michoacan were effectively under the control of the Templarios until mid-January, when the federal government mounted an offensive with the aim of smashing the cartel and bringing the militias to heel. Two prominent figures of the militia movement in Michoacan, Hipolito Mora and Jose Manuel Mireles, took part in Wednesday’s forum, along with politicians, journalists and attorneys such as Jaime Cardenas, who spoke of individual and collective defense as rights that “form part of the national and international juridical order.” Mora, Mireles and other militia activists in Michoacan have signed up for a new, army-supervised rural defense corps, while Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto recently announced plans for a new citizens patrol to bolster public safety in the troubled western state. source