On 24 February 2013, groups of armed vigilantes simultaneously took control of the towns of La Ruana and Tepalcatepec in the state of Michoacán, announcing themselves as the new purveyors of public security in their respective communities. Discontent with violence and extortion at the hands of organised crime, these ‘self-defence groups’, or ‘grupos de autodefensa’, spread across the state of Michoacán. Within a year, vigilante groups had swept through the state's interior, crippling the criminal organisation known as ‘Los Caballeros Templarios’ (‘The Knights Templar’) and leaving behind independent units in each ‘liberated’ town. They stopped short of capturing the capital city of Morelia, where they would have faced the full force of the state's security apparatus, which was lacking in the communities that took up arms.Footnote 1
Armed mobilisations against organised crime are uncommon in Mexico despite ingrained traditions of vigilante justice.Footnote 2 Across Latin America, civic responses to violence are often obstructed or co-opted by armed actors.Footnote 3 Why then did the autodefensa movement arise in Michoacán? The state has a long history of rural violence and drug trafficking.Footnote 4 It is currently a major exporter of methamphetamine and fentanyl and, since the early 2000s, has experienced multiple territorial conflicts between criminal groups.Footnote 5 The autodefensas specifically mobilised against the Knights Templar, an organisation that exercised state-like control over a large swathe of Michoacán's territory. The Templars notably used violence to extract resources from local communities and to administer their territories.Footnote 6 What is it about criminal governance under this organisation, and about the communities they subjugated, that explains the emergence of vigilante groups?
To explain these mobilisations, I examine the agrarian political economy of Michoacán's Tierra Caliente region, where the autodefensas originated, and the dynamics of criminal governance that took root in its communities. I build on recent research examining how economic inequality within communities can facilitate the creation of patron-funded vigilante groups.Footnote 7 I argue that the driving form of inequality behind vigilantism in Tierra Caliente is land inequality due to the dominance of export-oriented agribusiness. The region's agrarian class structures are reflected in the internal structure of the vigilante groups. Cattle ranchers, farmers and other local elites made up the autodefensa leadership circles, while workers and their families occupied the front lines against the Templars.
The drug trade is deeply embedded in Tierra Caliente society. Historically, relations between traffickers and their communities have not been characterised by violence or repression.Footnote 8 I argue that the arrival of external criminal actors in Tierra Caliente led to the creation of a social contract between organised crime and society. By social contract I mean a set of state–society relations, or the formal and informal agreements and obligations between entrenched powerholders and local populations.Footnote 9 Beginning with La Familia Michoacana, criminal actors sought legitimacy through the provision of protection and public goods. This social contract was breached by their successors, the Knights Templar, whose rule was characterised by widespread extortion, dispossession, dominance over political institutions and the constant threat and use of violence. I argue that the level of predation reached in Tierra Caliente elicited an armed rejection of the social contract by local elites, whose mobilisation of a broad contingent of the population was facilitated by the region's unequal agrarian social structures.
This article proceeds with a conceptual intervention on criminal governance, followed by a discussion on the dynamics of vigilantism. I then provide a historical reconstruction of Michoacán's Tierra Caliente region from the mid-twentieth century to the autodefensa uprising of 2013–14. I begin with the development patterns that generated high levels of social polarisation in the region, followed by the changing criminal and political landscape that gave way to criminal governance. I then analyse the autodefensa movement by triangulating a mix of newspaper reports, secondary sources, and interviews with former vigilante leaders, journalists and other informants with a privileged perspective on these events. Finally, I further substantiate my arguments with a quantitative analysis of the municipal-level factors that explain the emergence of vigilante groups in Michoacán.
Criminal Governance as a Social Contract
Criminal governance refers to the administration of territories and civilian populations by criminal organisations.Footnote 10 Criminal governance is often associated with state weakness, but not necessarily state absence.Footnote 11 It emerges within political systems, occupying lower levels of the state that are prone to corruption and neglect.Footnote 12 Although the initial installation of criminal groups in a community can be disruptive and violent, criminal governance consolidates when a single organisation dominates a territory.Footnote 13 The scope of criminal governance varies, covering specific illicit markets and actors or entire communities and regions, as do its modalities.Footnote 14 These can include the administration of security and public goods, participation in and/or control over formal institutions and political processes, and influence in local economies and civil society.Footnote 15
Recent studies have analysed these socio-political phenomena through the language of regimes,Footnote 16 emphasising the top-down relationships between rulers and subjects.Footnote 17 Beatriz Magaloni and her collaborators, for example, describe five types of criminal governance regime in Brazilian favelas.Footnote 18 Their typology is based on observed variation in criminal groups’ territorial control, relationships with the state and relationships with local communities.Footnote 19 For example, ‘insurgent’ criminal orders arise where criminal groups hold territorial monopolies, but are at odds with the state. Greater violence-making capacities allow these groups to provide protection and other social provisions. ‘Bandit’ criminal orders are like the insurgent except that their lower organisational capacities encourage the use of abusive governance strategies. The problem with this line of theorising is that it reduces community relationships to by-products of the installation of criminal regimes. The contrary is true: community relationships form the social foundations of criminal power.Footnote 20
From the vantage point of political sociology, I argue that criminal governance constitutes a social contract, or a set of state–society relations, between criminal organisations and local communities.Footnote 21 On the part of criminal organisations, social contracts can entail the delivery of public goods, supplies and foodstuffs to households, conflict resolution, the regulation of labour and commodity markets, and protection from other armed actors. Local communities can in turn offer recognition of legitimacy, loyalty and silence, the payment of taxes, and the availability of a labour force for illicit market activities. To this end, local communities are bound by a social contract to the extant governing actor, not just the state.Footnote 22
Criminal governance does not constitute an alternative or hybrid form of governance, as some authors argue, nor does it imply that there are multiple and competing sovereignties within modern states.Footnote 23 The idea of a social contract instead emphasises the embeddedness of these violent actors within existing socio-political structures. The lines between criminal, social and political actors are often blurred and the rise of criminal governance rarely means the state's authority is upended or replaced. Criminal organisations instead tend to play an intermediary role between local communities and the state,Footnote 24 while also sharing key aspects of sovereignty with the state:Footnote 25 in particular, claims to territory, taxation and the use of violence. Criminal groups insert themselves into the state's structures by exploiting local and subnational institutions, as well as strategic industries, for their economic and political resources.Footnote 26 In other words, criminal actors effectively co-organise societies in conjunction with the state. This means that criminal governance is not dissimilar to other neo-patrimonial formulations that are common in the Global South, whereby local powerholders mediate state–society relations while appropriating state resources.Footnote 27 It also exists as part of a larger universe of informal orders that define socio-political relations across Latin America.Footnote 28
Finally, although there is a clear imbalance of power between criminal organisations and subject populations, as there is in any political society, the term ‘social contract’ implies that both parties must meet certain obligations to maintain social order. It also implies that the governed have mechanisms, or at least motivations, to make claims on their rulers when these obligations are not met. Whereas the breaching of the social contract by the governed may lead to punitive violence, its infringement by the governing authority may incite some level of resistance.Footnote 29 As I argue occurred in Michoacán, the breaching of the social contract by the Templars resulted in their outright rejection by certain social sectors.
The Dynamics of Vigilantism
Vigilantism refers to ‘the collective use or threat of extra-legal violence in response to an alleged criminal act’.Footnote 30 It requires a target, a justification and motivation to organise, and its organisational forms and repertoires of violence vary widely.Footnote 31 Vigilante justice, especially in the form of lynchings, is widespread in Latin America as it historically provides a channel for dealing with perceived injustice and for making demands on the state.Footnote 32 Furthermore, these popular forms of justice tend to be defensive and embedded in local power dynamics, and thus employed as a form of social control.Footnote 33
This study focuses on the vigilante group, a community-based subcategory of armed non-state actors.Footnote 34 Vigilante groups are primarily concerned with protecting their communities (e.g., neighbourhood, town) from criminals or other armed actors, which differentiates them from more politically, economically or ideologically driven organisations such as guerrillas and paramilitaries.Footnote 35 Vigilante groups also develop organisational qualities that allow them to coordinate and carry out sustained crime-control and violence-making activities.Footnote 36 Vigilante groups are generally associated with high levels of crime and with state weakness in the provision of public security.Footnote 37 However, in Mexico, vigilantism is largely absent in areas with the highest rates of crime and lowest levels of state presence.Footnote 38 As will be discussed below, the issue is not necessarily the level of crime, but the dynamics of criminal authority.
Recent studies have focused on the material and organisational resources available to vigilante groups. As some have suggested in Mexico, historical memory of previous insurgencies provide local actors with access to cross-generational information and skillsets that facilitate armed mobilisation.Footnote 39 Mexican vigilante groups also benefit from remittances, supplies and direct participation by returning migrants.Footnote 40 In Michoacán, military officials played a key role in coordinating the initial autodefensa mobilisations.Footnote 41 While there is evidence that individual officials chose to support the vigilantes, it is difficult to ascertain to what extent the state played a role in creating and arming the autodefensas.Footnote 42 Notwithstanding historical and external factors, the availability and distribution of resources within communities are arguably more important factors in the mobilisation of vigilante groups.Footnote 43
A final line of argumentation focuses on the socioeconomic roots of vigilantism.Footnote 44 From this perspective, unequal access to resources often translates to unequal access to security. This is especially true for peripheral and marginalised communities that lack public or private protection. Furthermore, inequality within communities can facilitate the creation of vigilante groups that are patron-funded.Footnote 45 These vigilante groups have a clear division of labour between local elites who occupy leadership roles and workers that make up the rank and file. Such vigilante groups were the dominant type of organisation that appeared in Michoacán between 2013 and 2014.Footnote 46 This leads to the following question: what does it take for local elites to mobilise their resources and for workers to take up arms?
The Making of Michoacán's Tierra Caliente
Tierra Caliente is a semi-arid lowland region that spans the interior of Michoacán. The autodefensa movement originated in the western Apatzingán Valley, close to Tierra Caliente's political and economic centre (see Figure 1). Peripheral to Morelia and Mexico City, Tierra Caliente is characterised by historical underdevelopment and chronic political and rural violence.Footnote 47 Nonetheless, the region's agricultural potential made it the focus of an extensive development project known as the Tepalcatepec Commission.Footnote 48 Between 1947 and 1960, the Commission built hydroelectric dams and irrigation systems, as well as public infrastructure including electrification, sanitation and communication lines.Footnote 49 The Commission was inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority that transformed a large portion of the US South.Footnote 50 Like its northern predecessor, the Commission made Tierra Caliente more legible for the state through technocrat-directed social and economic change.
Figure 1. Michoacán, with Municipalities
Source: Author's elaboration.
Prior to the Tepalcatepec Commission, Michoacán had been the testing ground of Mexico's agrarian reform.Footnote 51 Between 1930 and 1970, over 350,000 hectares of land were redistributed to peasants in the Apatzingán Valley.Footnote 52 Over half of these lands were expropriated from just five landowners and distributed among 135 ejidos – the agrarian communities that formed the basis of Mexico's new land tenure system.Footnote 53 Land reform fundamentally altered the region's productive structure despite the persistence of private property.Footnote 54 The region was further transformed by a cotton boom that displaced the cultivation of traditional food crops (maize, beans) and reoriented Tierra Caliente's political economy toward the export market.Footnote 55 This section examines the consequences of these development patterns, in particular the polarisation of the region's social structures that underlay its export-oriented political economy.
The Social Polarisation of the Countryside
The rise of export agriculture and ongoing state interventions set off a process of social polarisation and land concentration in Tierra Caliente. Widespread land reform without sufficient access to credit meant that ejidatarios – the peasant beneficiaries of the reforms – could not fully exploit their land grants. Although the Tepalcatepec Commission provided credit and resources to small producers, ejidatarios were left with the work and costs of preparing their lands for cultivation and connecting their parcels to irrigation systems.Footnote 56 Contract farming proliferated in Tierra Caliente as private investors filled the resource gap left by the state.Footnote 57 Despite legal restrictions, ejidatarios often rented out their lands for several seasons due to debts incurred with investors or because they lacked the capital to produce on their own.Footnote 58 The shortcomings of land reform thus created the opening for new market actors to supplant ejidatarios.
Income and land became highly concentrated in Tierra Caliente as the dividends of economic growth were concentrated within the non-ejido sector.Footnote 59 A small set of actors dominated the more profitable export market while most ejidatarios were relegated to producing food crops or renting out their lands, creating a sectoral dualism in agriculture.Footnote 60 While many ejidatarios did not see a major increase in income or living standards, those with privileged access to irrigation and private credit managed to capitalise on the market.Footnote 61 These ejidatarios ascended to the status of middle-class farmers and accumulated capital by renting and farming the lands of other ejidatarios. Overall, the concentration of land and resources, including within ejidos, severely limited the reproduction of small and independent producers in the region.
Rural wage workers in Tierra Caliente were just as precarious as the peasantry. By 1970, most workers earned no more than subsistence wages, save for those who found agro-industrial employment in packing plants and cotton mills.Footnote 62 The workforce included a large contingent of internal migrants who arrived during harvest months. These workers often negotiated inferior contracts compared to locals, were paid less, worked longer days, and lacked formal and personal protections in an environment where pesticides were used liberally.Footnote 63 Thus, despite land reforms and the state's modernising intentions, Tierra Caliente society had bifurcated into those who benefited from export-led development and those who did not.
Crisis and Reform
Tierra Caliente's export-driven boom was relatively short lived. Plant diseases and falling international prices caused the cotton industry to decline by 1970.Footnote 64 Investors left the region as did many workers and families. Melon replaced cotton as the region's cash crop by the mid-1970s, but it was also phased out of production a decade later by price fluctuations and the removal of state subsidies.Footnote 65 Following a temporary drop in exports and employment during the late 1980s, the region's export sector was revived, monopolised and diversified by the private sector, in particular by foreign agribusiness.Footnote 66 At this time, Mexico implemented a series of market reforms that gutted industrial policies and liberalised trade and finance. The combined crisis and reform period deepened the sectoral dualism between commercial and small producers across the country, as it primarily benefited the former while exposing the latter to import competition.Footnote 67 In Tierra Caliente, these processes consolidated pre-existing trends of export-led development and social polarisation.
The economic downturn and overall lack of economic opportunities led many in the countryside to mitigate the crisis by migrating to the United States or by participating in the drug trade.Footnote 68 Illicit drug production thus expanded during the 1980s and 1990s with increased labour and capital inputs. Young men, above all, increasingly sought work cultivating cannabis and processing synthetic drugs.Footnote 69 Investments from agricultural elites increased the drug trade's capital supply and fundamentally tied together the profits from the region's licit and illicit exports.Footnote 70 Drug production also grew in scale and organisation as small producers created support networks in the face of land invasions and state repression.Footnote 71 As in the broader export sector, the dividends of the drug trade became concentrated in the hands of a small set of producers and later within criminal organisations.Footnote 72 The expansion of the illicit drug market in Tierra Caliente is therefore directly linked to the development patterns that polarised the region. Rural inequality and a booming (licit and illicit) export market thus paint the backdrop to which criminal governance, and later the autodefensa movement, emerged in Tierra Caliente.
The Rise of Criminal Governance in Tierra Caliente
As the Mexican economy liberalised toward the end of the century, so did its political landscape. Beginning in the late 1980s, several states including Michoacán saw the mobilisation of opposition parties that sought to challenge the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) at the ballot box.Footnote 73 Tierra Caliente suffered a destabilising episode of state violence during this period as army deployments – officially assigned to combat drug trafficking – were sent to Apatzingán to repress dissident organisations and sympathisers.Footnote 74 Political violence continued through the early 1990s as the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) made significant headway in contesting municipal elections.Footnote 75
Democratisation at the state level, however, did not occur until Lázaro Cárdenas Batel took over Michoacán's governorship in 2002 under the banner of the PRD.Footnote 76 As in other parts of Mexico, political liberalisation in Michoacán created an opening for criminal organisations to expand and penetrate state institutions.Footnote 77 This section examines the emergence of criminal governance following Michoacán's political opening. I focus on the capture of municipal governments and local economies by criminal organisations and the remaking of relations between criminal actors and society.
The Shifting Criminal Landscape
Michoacán's first drug trafficking organisation emerged during the era of political liberalisation. The Valencia Cartel was founded by cannabis producers who established connections with the Sinaloa and Tijuana Cartels to export to the US market, as well as with Colombia's Medellín Cartel to traffic cocaine through their territory.Footnote 78 Their presence in Michoacán did not last, however, as other organisations sought to gain a foothold in their strategic territory. In 2001, a conflict broke out between the Valencias and the Gulf Cartel.Footnote 79 The Gulf Cartel sent its enforcers, Los Zetas, to capture territory from the Valencia Cartel, who were still in alliance with the Sinaloans, setting off the first wave of violence in Michoacán.
Violence re-escalated between 2005 and 2006 as a new organisation called La Familia Michoacana emerged with the purpose of eliminating Los Zetas from Michoacán.Footnote 80 La Familia was initially formed by defectors from the Valencia Cartel and Los Zetas who progressively gained control over Tierra Caliente by capturing territory from rivals, incorporating local traffickers into their ranks, and by infiltrating municipal governments and police forces.Footnote 81 La Familia's presence in Tierra Caliente was temporarily consolidated following Operativo Conjunto Michoacán (Joint Operation Michoacán), a collaboration between the central and subnational state to crack down on organised crime. This incursion by the military and federal police dealt a severe blow to Los Zetas, crippling its presence in Michoacán.Footnote 82
Despite initial collaboration, intra-state cooperation deteriorated when La Familia launched an attack against civilians in September 2008.Footnote 83 The federal government, controlled by the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN), responded by ending security cooperation with subnational and municipal authorities and by punishing its political opposition, arresting public officials and launching a media campaign against PRD governor Leonel Godoy.Footnote 84 As the federal government criticised Godoy and the PRD's ability to govern and contain violence in Michoacán, power struggles within La Familia gave rise to a splinter group, the Knights Templar, in 2011.Footnote 85 Taking advantage of the intra-state conflict, the Templars proceeded to consolidate power in Tierra Caliente and much of Michoacán.Footnote 86
Remaking the Social Contract
Drug trafficking is deeply embedded in the rural communities of Tierra Caliente. By the 1980s, many inhabitants of the region had come to participate in the drug trade as a means of economic mobility without the social or moral stigmas that is otherwise attached to illicit markets.Footnote 87 Successful traffickers often acted as benefactors toward their communities and were highly regarded by locals.Footnote 88 Many of these illicit entrepreneurs invested time and money integrating themselves into local politics, business associations and civil society organisations.Footnote 89 Traffickers in turn accumulated a great deal of political and economic power within their communities. This is not to say that drug trafficking in Tierra Caliente is historically non-violent.Footnote 90 But, for the most part, traffickers and early criminal organisations did not direct violence toward local communities, nor did they extract resources from them.
The remaking of relations between criminal actors and society began with the arrival of Los Zetas, who imported new profit-making strategies into the region. They used extortion, kidnappings, and dispossession as quick and low-risk methods of exploiting local communities.Footnote 91 This ‘invasion’, as Tierra Caliente people call it, uprooted local drug trafficking networks and gave rise to a new territorial discourse employed by criminal groups.Footnote 92 When La Familia Michoacana emerged, the organisation employed a nativist rhetoric – emphasising its local roots and presenting itself as the legitimate protector of Michoacán from external and internal threats.Footnote 93 Exhausted with repression by Los Zetas, many social sectors, including local elites, welcomed La Familia and its promise of public security.Footnote 94 The organisation further legitimised itself by providing economic opportunities and investing in public infrastructure such as schools and drainage systems.Footnote 95 In Apatzingán, La Familia gained support from the disenfranchised by levying taxes on local businesses that were redistributed to thousands of poor families.Footnote 96 Despite its social commitments, La Familia adopted some of the extractive techniques employed by Los Zetas, in particular the extortion of local traffickers and of mining and agricultural industries.Footnote 97
Criminal governance under La Familia was consolidated through its control over local political institutions. Despite its revolutionary rhetoric, La Familia did not attempt to replace or overthrow the state. They instead inserted themselves into its lower structures by taking over municipal governments and police forces.Footnote 98 By 2007, La Familia had consolidated its presence in more than two-thirds of Michoacán's 113 municipalities.Footnote 99 In Mexico, public resources are often used to establish patronage networks between local populations, elites and elected officials. By fully appropriating these channels of political intermediation, La Familia, and later the Templars, effectively became the principal authorities of Tierra Caliente.Footnote 100 They governed through an overtly criminal form of caciquismo – a neo-patrimonial formation in which local powerholders shape and uphold local social orders through a mix of formal and informal mechanisms.Footnote 101
If Los Zetas introduced criminal governance to Tierra Caliente, then La Familia fundamentally reshaped state–society relations in the region. They essentially implemented a new social contract, where social order was guaranteed through violence and patronage. The Knights Templar built their criminal enterprise on this legacy. The transition from Familia to Templar rule was marked by benevolence and generosity in terms of social provisions.Footnote 102 But state crackdowns and the fiscal requirements of war-making and self-maintenance led the Templars to expand their extractive activities, initially aimed at local traffickers.Footnote 103 Increasing coercive capacities requires money, which was secured by broadening and intensifying protection rackets.Footnote 104 To this end, the Templars differed critically from their predecessors in that they extracted resources from and enacted violence against local communities in a more systematic manner.Footnote 105
The change in governance first became apparent in the economic sector, as most market activities were gradually subject to taxes. Cuotas (fees) were regularly applied to livestock ranches, lemon groves, food stands, tortilla producers and many other businesses.Footnote 106 In the non-economic sphere, violence was employed to promote the organisation's vision of social order. The Templars punished crimes and other infractions such as theft, sexual and domestic violence, and adultery.Footnote 107 In some communities, they went as far as to regulate daily life by limiting socialisation in public squares and parks, which made locals afraid to interact with their friends, family, and neighbours.Footnote 108 The violent imposition of order, along with continued narratives about social justice and protection from external threats, gave the Templars a certain level of legitimacy with (reluctant) local communities.Footnote 109
The Templars’ maintenance of social order, however, quickly became repressive and their taxation regime increased the cost of living in Tierra Caliente.Footnote 110 By 2013, the Templars had disembedded themselves from local society by subjecting individuals and families to new dynamics of arbitrary and excessive violence. The proliferation of executions, kidnappings, dispossession and sexual violence had breached and reconfigured the social contract which had previously limited these types of violence.Footnote 111
A Social Upheaval
On Sunday afternoon, 24 February 2013, Hipólito Mora rallied a growing crowd of people in the town square of La Ruana to fight against the Knights Templar.Footnote 112 With shotguns and hunting rifles in hand, the vigilantes set off to search for Templars. The group took La Ruana without firing a shot – their targets fled the town upon hearing about the uprising. Meanwhile in Tepalcatepec, weapons and white t-shirts were being distributed among a group of about 80 people from the local ranchers’ association.Footnote 113 The t-shirts read ‘Policía Comunitaria’ (‘Community Police’) on the front and ‘Por un Tepalcatepec Libre’ (‘For a Free Tepalcatepec’) on the back. A group of Templar sicarios (henchmen) interrupted the meeting, but they were subdued by the vigilantes with help from an army patrol. The Tepalcatepec autodefensas proceeded to hunt down the remaining Templars in their community. By that afternoon, over 3,000 people had joined their ranks.Footnote 114 Two days later, a third vigilante group mobilised against the Templars in the town of Buenavista Tomatlán.Footnote 115
Following the uprisings, the Templars laid siege to La Ruana, Tepalcatepec and Buenavista Tomatlán. For several months, the autodefensas withstood attacks by caravans of sicarios who were mobilised from Templar strongholds in Apatzingán, Aguililla, Arteaga and Tumbiscatío.Footnote 116 Many vigilante-controlled communities suffered supply shortages due to blockades installed by the Templars.Footnote 117 The Templars also organised protests throughout the state and published online attacks attempting to delegitimise the vigilantes.Footnote 118
Despite the backlash, the initial mobilisations inspired several communities in Tierra Caliente and the Sierra Costa region to take up arms. These included Coalcomán, Aguililla, Chinicuila, Los Reyes and Aquila. Many vigilante groups formed with the strategic or armed support of the original autodefensas. By the end of 2013, some groups had embarked on a ‘liberation’ campaign across Michoacán, leaving independent units in communities captured from the Templars.Footnote 119 By early 2014, vigilante groups were present in over 40 municipalities. What began as a loosely coordinated uprising quickly evolved into a social movement and armed conflict that brought Tierra Caliente into the international spotlight.Footnote 120
Mobilising Inequalities
Despite broad popular support and participation, there were clear class divisions between the vigilante rank and file and leadership. The organisers and leaders of the movement were predominantly farmers, cattle ranchers and other local elites (including drug traffickers) with the economic means and motivations to mobilise their workers.Footnote 121 In order to institutionalise themselves and dispel accusations of being criminal organisations, several vigilante groups created community councils with operational oversight.Footnote 122 In Tepalcatepec, the movement was organised by the cattle rancher, cheese producer and alleged drug trafficker Juan José Farías Álvarez (‘El Abuelo’);Footnote 123 Juventino Cisneros Andrade (‘El Tilín’) and Alberto Gutiérrez (‘Comandante Cinco’), both cattle ranchers and farmers;Footnote 124 and local politician Martín Barragán Cerna.Footnote 125 The first community council to oversee Tepalcatepec's autodefensas was made up of professionals, ranchers and farmers, most of whom held positions in local and regional economic associations.Footnote 126
The connections between the autodefensas, export industries, local politics and organised crime were clear across southern Michoacán. Coalcomán's vigilantes were led by a former mayor and sawmill owner named Misael González.Footnote 127 Adalberto Fructuoso Comparán Rodríguez, another former mayor and alleged ex-Templar, headed the movement in Aguililla with funds from the mining industry.Footnote 128 The autodefensas of Zicuirán were organised by the president of the melon producers’ association, Ulises Sánchez Garibay (‘El Inge’), who allegedly took orders from an important drug trafficker in the region.Footnote 129 The autodefensas of Buenavista Tomatlán were founded by Luis Antonio Torres (‘Simón El Americano’), a known criminal operative.Footnote 130 Comandante Cinco, mentioned above, allegedly cleaned the Templars out of Parácuaro with the help of another criminal group and installed a new vigilante unit under his command.Footnote 131
In La Ruana, the Templars not only taxed the town's most important industry – limes; they also took over control of its production by periodically closing packing plants in order to inflate prices.Footnote 132 Of the approximately 100 people that made up La Ruana's vigilante group, the overwhelming majority were lime pickers and bricklayers. Only a handful were ranchers and fewer were lime producers, such as their leader, Hipólito Mora.Footnote 133 Across the region, it was not uncommon for local elites to organise or to send their own workers to fight in their place.Footnote 134
In Zicuirán, local melon producers began arming their workers in late 2013 after their taxes to the Templars were doubled.Footnote 135 Vigilante leaders from Tepalcatepec arrived in Zicuirán on 18 December to help them establish their own autodefensas. According to anonymous testimonies, melon workers were called to the town square by El Inge, mentioned above, who promised them overtime pay.Footnote 136 Others were fortifying the town's entrance during the public meeting when the army arrived to disarm them. According to José Manuel Mireles, spokesperson of the autodefensas, the people at the town square rushed to the scene to support their comrades. Testimonies collected by the CNDH, however, suggest that they were ordered there by their patrón (boss).Footnote 137 The soldiers opened fire in the commotion, injuring two packing plant workers and killing another. Scenes like this highlight the patronage dynamics within the vigilante movement, which was turning its leaders into Tierra Caliente's new caciques.Footnote 138
The diffusion of patron-funded organisations reflects the agrarian inequalities that predominate in southern Michoacán. Decades of export-oriented development generated the unequal social structures in Tierra Caliente that facilitated the rise of elite-organised vigilantism. Although the region's export economy began to take shape in the 1950s, market reforms during the 1980s and 1990s consolidated longstanding patterns of social polarisation, land concentration and illicit market activities. The accumulation of land and resources within agricultural elites made them susceptible to extortion by the criminal organisations that emerged during the 2000s. Their resources, and the availability and willingness of workers to become ‘violence specialists’, were critical for the uprisings to materialise and spread across Michoacán.Footnote 139
As Figure 2 visualises, vigilante groups generally emerged in municipalities with high levels of land concentration, that is, where large landholdings measuring at least 100 hectares dominate the agricultural sector. This includes most of the municipalities of Tierra Caliente, and the entire Sierra Costa region. The latter is also characterised by unequal agrarian social structures – not to mention the highest levels of land concentration in Michoacán – that stem from private property regimes that were unaffected by agrarian reform.Footnote 140 It is therefore no surprise that communities in the Sierra Costa, such as Aquila and Coalcomán, figured prominently within the autodefensa movement.
Figure 2. Michoacán: Land Concentration and Vigilante Group Presence
Source: Elaborated using data from INEGI, Censo agrícola; CNDH, Informe especial; and various primary sources (see ‘Statistical Analysis’ section).
Social inequalities are relevant to understanding not only the autodefensas, but their antagonists as well. Templar warlords exploited a private army of sicarios and halcones (lookouts) to build their criminal enterprise, administer their territories and fight back against the autodefensas. According to documents confiscated from Templar safe houses, the organisation paid its workers a minimum of 8,000 pesos a month – approximately US$625 in 2013.Footnote 141 Those employed as lookouts were the lowest paid. Sicarios earned slightly more at about 12,000 pesos per month (US$940). Although not high, these wages are attractive in Michoacán, where over half of the population makes under 6,000 pesos a month.Footnote 142 Despite their crucial role within the organisation, illicit workers earned peanuts compared to their bosses, who would earn up to 200,000 pesos a week (US$15,700).Footnote 143
These illicit workers – mostly teenagers and young men – formed the social basis of the Templar organisation just as the rank-and-file autodefensas were the core of their movement. Nonetheless, despite their patron-funded structure, the autodefensas counted on extensive, but not universal, support and participation from local populations.Footnote 144 Much like La Familia and the Templars, the autodefensas employed narratives of state abandonment and external threats to gain legitimacy within their communities.Footnote 145 Claims to legitimacy notwithstanding, widespread discontent with criminal governance produced a social upheaval. Whereas resource distribution and concentration may have facilitated the creation of vigilante groups, the most proximate and determining factor behind vigilantism is the installation of criminal governance and the transformation of state–society relations in Michoacán.
Statistical Analysis
At the height of the movement, autodefensas were present in 42 out of Michoacán's 113 municipalities.Footnote 146 Although concentrated in the south, vigilantism spread to nearly all corners of the state (refer to Figure 2). It is important to note, however, that Michoacán is geographically and culturally diverse – a mosaic of regions with multiple political and economic centres.Footnote 147 This section therefore applies a test of generalisability for the argument developed from the Tierra Caliente case. To do so, I employ logistic regression analysis to examine the factors that explain vigilantism in Michoacán between February 2013 and March 2014. The dependent variable is dichotomous, where ‘1’ denotes the presence of vigilante organisations in a municipality and ‘0’ their absence. The period of analysis captures the core of the autodefensa movement before it was demobilised by the federal government.Footnote 148
The key socioeconomic variables to consider are land concentration and land inequality. Whereas land concentration should capture the potential for local elites to fund vigilante groups, land inequality captures the propensity for workers to participate in armed vigilantism.Footnote 149 Land concentration is the percentage of agricultural land contained in landholdings measuring over 100 hectares in surface area. Land inequality is a Gini index for agricultural landholdings that ranges from 0 to 100, with higher values indicating greater inequality. The models presented in Table 1 show that a one percentage point increase in land concentration increases the odds of vigilante group formation by 3.8 per cent, and each one-point increase in land inequality increases it by 4.5 per cent. Income inequality,Footnote 150 for the sake of comparison, produces higher but only marginally significant results (+18.2 per cent), which suggests that it is a less reliable predictor of vigilantism. The argument that agrarian inequalities underlay the autodefensas movement thus holds across Michoacán.
Table 1. Logistic Regressions of Vigilante Group Formation in Michoacán
Odds ratios with robust standard errors in parentheses (***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05, +p < 0.1). An odds ratio with a value greater than 1 indicates that an event is more likely to occur as the predictor increases. A value less than 1 indicates that the event is less likely to occur. To facilitate interpretation as a percentage change, holding all other variables constant, subtract 1 from the odds ratio and multiply by 100.
AIC = Akaike Information Criterion, an estimator of prediction error
The next factor under consideration is criminal governance. According to Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley, it is possible to proxy criminal governance by identifying which municipalities are vulnerable to capture.Footnote 151 They argue that local governments are a key target for criminal groups that aim to establish territorial control over specific areas. To achieve their goals, criminal groups are incentivised to launch attacks against local political actors. Therefore, a binary indicator of criminal attacks is used to proxy criminal governance.Footnote 152 Between 2007 and 2012, Michoacán experienced a total of 69 high-profile attacks – 28.5 per cent of all attacks in Mexico – distributed among 37 municipalities. The models suggest that municipalities that suffered criminal attacks were 270 to 440 per cent more likely to see the emergence of vigilante groups, compared to those with no attacks. The argument that vigilantism is a direct response to criminal governance also holds.
Vigilantism is often associated with high levels of crime and weak state capacity.Footnote 153 Like prior research,Footnote 154 the models show no relationship between vigilantism and homicide rates.Footnote 155 I proxy low state capacity with an inaccessibility variable that measures the percentage of the population with low access to paved roads.Footnote 156 Accessibility to road networks is important not only for people to access markets and public services, but for the state to ‘see’ and administer its territories and subjects.Footnote 157 The models suggest that inaccessible municipalities are more likely to see the emergence of vigilante groups.
This finding is unsurprising since inaccessibility, or illegibility, can give rise to armed non-state actors, such as criminal organisations and vigilante groups, that have more intimate knowledge of the terrain and of their communities. Although these violent actors also benefit from accessible infrastructure, they do not rely on it to engage in market or violence-making activities.Footnote 158 As different journalists explained, there is a network of dirt roads that cut through southern Michoacán. These roads connect Tierra Caliente's localities to each other, to mountain communities, to the coast, and to economic hubs such as Apatzingán and Lázaro Cárdenas. Locals, including criminal groups and autodefensas, can navigate these terrains better than the state's security forces. During Joint Operation Michoacán, federal police convoys were sometimes mobilised into the Sierra Madre del Sur – where criminal garrisons were located – only to get lost, ambushed and killed in the mountains.Footnote 159
Other variables considered here include spatial diffusion,Footnote 160 social deprivation,Footnote 161 migration intensity (to the United States),Footnote 162 and indigeneity.Footnote 163 The models show a diffusion process in which municipalities were 900 to 1250 per cent more likely to have vigilante groups if a neighbouring municipality had vigilantes. Recall that some autodefensa groups collaborated to ‘clean’ Templar rule out of other communities and ‘liberate’ them. Indicators for social deprivation and indigeneity produce no significant results. Finally, the models show that migration intensity is negatively associated with the presence of vigilante groups. These results contradict national studies on migration and vigilantism, as well as evidence provided by journalists.Footnote 164 There is a simple explanation. Michoacán as a whole is a migrant-sending state. While migrants may have played a clear role in the mobilisations, migration rates are higher in the communities that did not mobilise.
Concluding Remarks
This article contributes to the study of criminal governance by making a sociological intervention in the literature. This emerging and interdisciplinary area of research is dominated by political scientists who focus on the top-down relationships between criminal organisations and the communities they govern,Footnote 165 which inadvertently obfuscates the complex interactions between these armed actors and civilians.Footnote 166 From the standpoint of political sociology, I argue that criminal governance constitutes a social contract – a set of state–society relations – between organised crime and society. This approach focuses on the informal agreements and commitments that actors in power have with different social and political sectors, as well as the consequences of breaking these arrangements.Footnote 167
To this end, this research provides two key conceptual insights for the study of violence and governance in Latin America. The first adheres to Weberian tradition: local social orders are shaped by those who lay a claim to violence. This means that criminal rule is not an issue of alternative governance or competing sovereignties, as many claim,Footnote 168 because it does not challenge or deviate from existing socio-political structures. This is instead a question of haphazard state formation. Criminal actors are simply local powerholders that co-organise social relations in conjunction with states that rule their peripheries through intermediaries.Footnote 169 Landowners, agrarian reformers and religious groups, to name a few, have filled similar roles in Mexico across time and space – and many have done so with violence.Footnote 170
The second insight is admittedly Polanyian: criminal governance does not emerge in a social vacuum. Criminal orders are embedded in locally and regionally specific political economies and social relations. Yet the burgeoning literature on criminal politics in Latin America tends to overlook the social foundations of violence and illicit markets.Footnote 171 This is a severe oversight in a region where the proliferation of new armed actors has accompanied political and economic liberalisation.Footnote 172 Criminal governance systems have unsurprisingly materialised in this context of ‘democratised violence’.Footnote 173 Therefore, it is important to consider how criminal orders are rooted in both longstanding and changing class structures and inequalities.
These insights suggest that the social contract framework can be used to study state–society relations and criminal authority in drug-producing and transit communities across time and space. Within Mexico, future studies should consider how community relationships with local powerholders were transformed by the cartelisation of the drug trade.Footnote 174 There is also a lack of research on the gendered dynamics of vigilante movements,Footnote 175 let alone research that genders criminal rule. Criminal groups have risen to prominence in a variety of contexts across Latin America, but there is an urban bias in the literature.Footnote 176 As a result, we lack a systematic comparison of criminal authority and social responses in rural versus urban settings.
As the case of Tierra Caliente demonstrates, the emergence of criminal governance and increasing repression against local communities led to the dissolution of a local social order that historically accommodated drug trafficking and violence. The Knights Templar established themselves as de facto rulers in their communities, effectively reorganising state–society relations through the excessive and arbitrary use of violence and extortion. The result was an armed rejection of criminal governance built on the region's unequal class structures. Local elites led the movement by organising their workers on the moral grounds of ending extortion and violence at the hands of the Templars. Their goal was to mitigate violence, not to eradicate it altogether, by recreating an old social order where violence and illicit markets were regulated by moral economies.Footnote 177
The case study is further substantiated with a quantitative analysis of the political and socioeconomic factors that explain the emergence of vigilante organisations. I report three key findings. First, greater levels of land concentration and land inequality are associated with the formation of autodefensa groups in Michoacán. Resource concentration increases the likelihood for local elites to fund vigilante groups, while unequal access to resources increases the propensity for workers to become violence specialists. Second, municipalities that suffered attacks against local political actors were more likely to form vigilante groups. As Trejo and Ley argue, such high-profile attacks are often precursors to the installation of criminal governance systems,Footnote 178 and, in turn, to the transformation of state–society relations in these communities. Third, vigilante groups were more likely to form in inaccessible territories, or in areas with weak state capacity. Road and communication networks make territories legible, and in turn governable, which is far more crucial for external state agents than it is for local armed actors.
What of Tierra Caliente and Michoacán since the autodefensa movement? After initially refusing to acknowledge the severity of the crisis, the federal government eventually intervened by attempting to institutionalise the vigilantes.Footnote 179 A few groups adhered to the state's mandate to demobilise by May 2014 and still exist as state-sanctioned community police. This is the case with Tepalcatepec's autodefensas. Some groups failed to endure as their leaders and members were imprisoned. This was true of La Ruana's autodefensas. Others refused to lay down their weapons and instead morphed into criminal organisations. Thus, one direct consequence of the movement is the smashing of the Templar empire into over a dozen smaller criminal groups.Footnote 180 Another is the creation of new channels of political intermediation – or new social contracts – occupied by armed actors who were empowered by the vigilante movement.Footnote 181
Unfortunately, parts of Tierra Caliente and the Sierra Costa are undergoing new waves of violence and displacement as a new organisation – Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – expands its presence in Michoacán.Footnote 182 And according to several informants, the traditions of criminal governance have been kept alive by the multitude of armed actors spread across the state. While the autodefensas did succeed in eliminating their oppressors, the short-lived movement ultimately perpetuated the cycle of violence in Tierra Caliente.Footnote 183 As a local priest commented at the end of an interview: ‘Vamos a terminar peor que cuando estaban los templarios’ (‘We are going to end up worse than when the Templars were here’).
Acknowledgements
The author thanks César Ayala, Diane Davis, Juan Delgado, Kevan Harris, Andrew Le, and participants of the UCLA Political Sociology and the Global South Working Group for helpful comments throughout the writing process. Special thanks to Ian Peacock for lending his mapmaking skills to this project. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. This research benefited from funding from the UCLA International Institute, the UCLA Latin American Institute, and the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
Open access
