The Mexican Town That Kicked Out the Cartels—and Told the Police and Political Parties to Get Lost Too

imjustabagofbags:

Almost a thousand miles south of Houston, the Mexican town of
Cheran was once afflicted by gangsters who had branched into the timber
trade. They killed, they kidnapped, and they kept cutting down trees
that they didn’t have a right to take. And so, the BBC reports,

Friday 15 April 2011, Cheran’s levantamiento, or uprising, began. On
the road coming down from the forest outside Margarita’s home, the women
blockaded the loggers’ pick-ups and took some of them hostage. As the
church bells of El Calvario rang out and fireworks exploded in the dawn
sky alerting the community to danger, the people of Cheran came running
to help. It was tense—hotheads had to be persuaded by the women not to
string up the hostages from an ancient tree outside the church….

The municipal police arrived with the mayor, and armed men came to free
their hostage-friends. There was an uneasy stand-off between the
townspeople, the loggers and the police. It ended after two loggers were
injured by a young man who shot a firework directly at them….

The police and local politicians were quickly driven out of town because
the people suspected they were collaborating with the criminal
networks. Political parties were banned—and still are—because they were
deemed to have caused divisions between people….

Meanwhile armed checkpoints were established on the three main roads coming in to town.

Today, five years later, those checkpoints still exist. They are guarded
by members of the Ronda Comunitaria—a militia or local police force
made up of men and women from Cheran.

Now that the gangsters are no longer raiding the forest, the locals
manage the resource, in what sounds like the sort of community-based
system that the late Elinor Ostrom
frequently wrote about. Meanwhile, the BBC’s writer notes that “in the
last year there have been no murders, kidnaps or disappearances” in
Cheran, even as such crimes are common in communities just a few
kilometers away. The place hasn’t declared independence—various sorts of
government funding are still flowing, and when serious crimes do occur
the attorney general can prosecute them—but the town of 20,000 has
achieved a remarkable level of autonomy.

To read the whole thing, go here. To read about some other efforts in the area to battle the cartels outside the state, go here—and to see how the state eventually absorbed those efforts, go here.
And even further south, to read about a village in Colombia that kicked
out all armed groups, from right-wing paramilitaries to left-wing
guerrillas to officially sanctioned soldiers and cops, go here.

The Mexican Town That Kicked Out the Cartels—and Told the Police and Political Parties to Get Lost Too