In the western Mexican state of Michoacan, a region controlled by drug cartels and vigilante militias, a functioning government is a distant concept. The Roman Catholic bishop of Apatzingan appears to agree with that statement in a pastoral letter he wrote earlier this month. "Michoacan shows every sign of a failed state," Bishop Miguel Patino wrote "Our people in Michoacan have for years been suffering the injustices of organised crime, which have got worse in recent months."
The most recent wave of violence killed scores of people and featured attacks on transformer and petrol stations. Afterward the Mexican government decided to do more than merely look on from afar and deployed soldiers in the region. The soldiers marched into the key port city of Lazaro Cardenas at the beginning of this week. No longer trusting the local police to guarantee public safety in the area, they occupied the harbour and started to patrol the city.
Local police forces in Mexico are widely regarded as ill-trained or corrupt, sometimes both. "Our goal is to strengthen the rule of law, and to restore peace, legality and security in this state," Eduardo Sanchez, spokesman for Mexico's Security Cabinet, said as he announced the deployment of troops.
In the city of Apatzingan heavily armed soldiers also took on tasks previously performed by police. There is a lot to do to restore security in Michoacan, Mexican Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio admitted. Large portions of the state are controlled by the drug cartel Caballeros Templarios - the knights templar. Other criminal gangs, like Los Zetas and Jalisco Nueva Generacion, are trying to get a footing in the stronghold of the knights templar. And armed vigilante militias are also making a contribution to conflict in Mexico's Wild West.
"In Michoacan there are currently two governments," social scientist Rene Jimenez Ornelas recently told the daily El Universal. "One by the state and one by organised crime, and sometimes the latter has more power than the former." In some areas, the knights templar control every area of public life down to the price of the tortillas that are a staple of Mexicans' diet. Often, citizens have little else to do but to take up arms to defend themselves, says Jimenez Ornelas.
Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, who during his time in office from 2002-10 oversaw the demobilization of right-wing paramilitaries and is regarded as an expert in internal conflicts, warns against taking justice in one's own hands. "Everything may start with an ideal and with a noble goal, but it ends in drug trafficking, like the (Colombian) rebels, or ends in the most cruel forms of crime," Uribe said in a recent interview.
The Mexican drug war is all about control of territory and lucrative profits. For the knights templar Michoacan is a never-ending source of funds, and the Pacific port of Lazaro Cardenas is a real goldmine. They rule over drug trafficking and also extort money from farmers, business people and even town mayors. The Caballeros Templarios take a cut in virtually any business done in Michoacan. Every year, they get more than 74 million dollars, the daily Milenio reported, citing Mexican secret service sources. And that count does not even include the cartel's international drug business.
Unlike other cartels, the pseudo-religious knights templar do not go about their illegal business quietly: they put themselves forward as an alternative to the state. "We are servants. We fight for the interests of the people of Michoacan," the leader of the gang, Servando Gomez Martinez, said in one video message. Experts even talk of a "narco-uprising," based on the cartel's self-declared claims to territorial rule and legitimate representation of the people.
The cartels try to set up lasting parallel power structures in the areas they control, security expert John Sullivan said in the specialist magazine Small Wars Journal. "Mexico's cartels are evolving distinct political aims," Sullivan wrote. "Using social services and infrastructure protection as levers in rural areas and small towns, these non-state actors are building a social base."