Mexican Cartels' War on Farming Villages

"We find ourselves under siege. This is a public cry for help by a community that's been cornered."
"They've been trying to get assistance by federal and state government, unsuccessfully, so they're trying to escalate the language to try to negotiate and get help."
Falko Ernst, analyst, International Crisis Group 

"I don't know how they can get the government's attention aside by doing these sorts of things -- or by dying, and even that will only get the authorities' attention for a few days."
Chris Kyle, anthropologist, University of Alabama, Birmingham

Miguel Toribio, 11, puts a pistol belonging to his father into his belt, before demonstrating newly learnt skills from military-style weapons training, to a Reuters journalist in Ayahualtempa, Mexico, February 3, 2020.   REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

The children wear uniforms with jackets emblazoned with "Community Police". They mask their faces with handkerchiefs. Thirteen-year-old Alex spoke of the training he received, how good it made him feel. He could feel the weight of the gun, fully loaded with ammunition. "There was no fear in his eyes. That's how I knew he was ready", his father Santos Martinez said. "I'm preparing to defend my village", Alex added.

Mexico's enormous problem with heroin production and drug cartels and gang killings is legendary. Not so well known is the plight of remote villages in areas where the drug gangs control everything, posing an existential threat to villagers' safety, controlling their comings and goings, exacting vengeance on those they believe betray them, and the ongoing siege of the villages leading to well-founded fears for the lives of village children.

Fathers of families see little option but to allow their children to be involved in military-type training, learning how to handle themselves in dangerous situations, arming them with deadly weapons to enable them to self-protect should/when the occasion arises. Venturing outside her community, a 56-year-old villager, a grandmother, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by cartel members, a warning to others to remain in their villages, silent, obedient.

The ten-year-old granddaughter of the murdered woman was given her father's permission to obtain training. "They do this to prepare themselves to defend the family, their siblings and defend the village", corn farmer Sanchez Luna explained of the "community police" his rugged region was required to form in self-defence. Arms training is offered to school-age children, seen as a matter of forced necessity.

Children walk in a single file, holding toy and real guns, as they demonstrate newly learnt skills from military-style weapons training, to a Reuters journalist, in Ayahualtempa, Mexico, February 3, 2020. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

Children as young as six years of age are seen carrying guns, demonstrating their military manoeuvres with ease. "They are killing children. We have to arm children", said 25-year-old Isabel Marquez, mother of two. The Indigenous community elders near the city of Chilapa add that young children would not be allowed to fight cartel gunmen; the situation is being used to attract help from far-off officials in Mexico City.

Last month suspected Los Ardillos Cartel members ambushed and killed ten area musicians after they had exited the territory their self-defence militias guard. Their bodies were  later found charred. The cartel dominates Guerrero state, their specialty the trafficking of heroin. A number of murders in the area preceded the attack on the musicians. One murder was a beheading, frightening the 6,500 residents whose land sits surrounded by poppy-growing farmland.

In Mexico, constant violence led by heroin-trafficking cartels threatens the population. President Manuel Andres Lopez Obrador has focused on the method, not the message: Those who arm children "should be ashamed of themselves", he pronounced, denouncing the use of children to grab the attention of an inattentive government. It worked. The government noticed."Giving children weapons and taking videos is an act of cruelty", he added and doesn't seem ashamed that its citizens must resort to such methods.

A community police agent poses for a photo as he guards a check point in Ayahualtempa, Mexico, January 30, 2020. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

Residents, for seemingly good reasons, are suspicious of regional authorities, much less the few local police in their villages. They accuse them of being in league with the Los Ardillos cartel, whose presence forces their children to stop formal education at age twelve, since the middle schools are located in territory the cartel controls.So, from that age forward, the boys become men, carrying weapons as part of their own local "police patrol".

"We are surrounded by the bad guys, so we have to prepare ourselves to defend our town and our families", said Louis 'Gustavo Morales, 13,  holding a 20-gauge shotgun. The self-defence militia is known as CRAC-PF. Last year they managed to repel a major attack by Los Ardillos, leaving residents in fear of the warning siren going off again.

Children with toy and real guns demonstrate newly learnt skills from military-style weapons training, to a Reuters journalist in Ayahualtempa, Mexico, February 3, 2020. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

"Likely Long Gone"

"Technically speaking, they could be very far away. Could they have flown? That's unlikely, but they could drive just about anywhere. There's lots of places to get over the border from Canada to the United States without being detected... For all we know, they could be in a car on their way to Mexico or in Mexico at this point."
"They've had time to utilize standard society to get away, so they could be well on their way."
"Now we're into the Hollywood movie kind of thing, because having probably watched too many things online, who knows what's in their head. I can only tell you what I would do and I would likely disappear into society and do all those silly Hollywood tricks like change my appearance."
"It's one thing to be experienced, it's another to be a fugitive on the run ... they're kids. Maybe they're pretending they're in Hunger Games. this is absolutely not Tarzan, this is fugitives doing whatever they can to escape and evade, they're not war vets trained in wilderness survival. this is not Rambo, they're not hiding in mud banks, these are a couple of kids on the run."
Les Stroud, Canadian survivalist "Survivorman"

Manitoba RCMP have announced that they believe the bodies of Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod have been found.

"I haven't heard anyone say we've seen them go into the woods with an axe and banana, no one ever said that. I'm half thinking they met someone in a big town ... and they've long gone to Texas or the Bahamas."
"Either they've been helped by someone, maybe they got to Winnipeg and stayed there, out of sight and now they're heading east now that the heat is off."
"But if I was them, I would've been heading east about two days after the army moved into Gillam because that's where the police and the whole army thinks they're up there, so the last place they're going to look for them is Northern Ontario ... how they've got anywhere is beyond me."
"This is not a heist, these are seemingly random killings on the West coast ... We're not dealing with Ocean's 11 here, this is a couple of kids too deep in a rabbit hole. It's highly unlikely there's a system of people working with them."
"If they've gone in there [the dense northern Manitoba bush], four to ten km deep and expired, they may never be found. All those guys had to do was go eight kilometres in or around the lake, expire over there. The animals would make most of them disappear and their bodies would just go back into the ground."
Terry Grant, cowboy, "Mantracker"

Triple murder suspects, two young men in their late teens from Port Alberni in British Columbia were tracked fruitlessly by the RCMP with help from a military plane equipped with sensors for two weeks. An intensive search took place primarily in and around an isolated northern Manitoba town of 1,265 inhabitants where they were last seen, in Gillam, Manitoba, surrounded by dense forest and boggy terrain, making the search difficult and speculation about how two teens who were not experienced outdoorsmen could even survive.

Well, that speculation has now been answered. They failed to survive. And it is also highly likely that for the greater time that the search had gone on, they were already dead. An autopsy is under way that will identify how they died, depending on the state of decomposition of the corpses. The RCMP had, in the last few days, discovered discarded objects that they had definitely linked to the two fugitives, after an RCMP dive team had scoured the Nelson River, those objects discovered on the shore.

Yet another intensive search on land this time, took place, which succeeded in discovering the bodies of two men about eight kilometers' distant from where their abandoned, torched vehicle had been found two weeks earlier. Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod were wanted on a second-degree murder charge in the death of 64-year-old University of British Columbia biology professor Leonard Dyck, along with suspicion that they were responsible for the shooting deaths of Australian tourist Lucas Fowler, 23, and his U.S. girlfriend, 24-year-old Chynna Deese, in northern British Columbia.

The bodies of tourists Chynna Deese and Lucas Fowler, left, were found near Liard Hot Springs, B.C., on July 15. University lecturer Leonard Dyck, right, was found dead four days later near Dease Lake, B.C. (New South Wales Police; University of British Columbia)

The two fugitives were at first regarded as missing teens, until suddenly evidence was unearthed to link them to the three random killings, committed some distance from one another. After the murders they moved quickly across four provinces in the space of ten days, last recognized in Gillam on July 22nd. And from that time forward the search commenced, officers going house-to-house in the community and other nearby isolated towns, as well as combing extensively through the boggy terrain of the surrounding forests known to house aggressive wildlife and seasonal stinging insects, in an environment that would test the survival skills of experienced backwoodsmen.

Evidently, it had tested the resolve of the two young men, and found them wanting in the kind of resilience and resourcefulness in a natural environment with abundant potable water and berries to enable them to survive the test. “While there were no confirmed sightings since July 22nd, our officers never gave up in their search efforts – following up on every lead, considering all options, and using every available resource. Our officers knew that we just needed to find that one piece of evidence that could move this search forward", explained Assistant Commissioner Jane MacLatchy, commanding officer of the Manitoba RCMP.

Security camera images of Kam McLeod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, are displayed during a news conference in Surrey, British Columbia, Tuesday, July 23, 2019. The two young men, thought to be missing, are now suspects in the murders of an American woman and her Australian boyfriend as well as the death of another man in northern British Columbia. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)