Late
one night last January, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, a
group of community policemen met in the courtyard of a friend’s house to
discuss the murders, kidnappings, and extortion that had beset Olinalá,
a remote town high in the Sierra Madre del Sur. Nearly all were
indigenous farmers, and their skin was burnished by the sun. Most
carried guns. The group’s coördinator, a slim man with a mustache named
Bernardo Ayala, laid his cell phone on a table, put it on speaker, and
called their leader: Nestora Salgado, a grandmother of five who lives
outside Seattle.
“Hello, commander,” Ayala said. “All of the compañeros
are here.” Salgado greeted them, her voice echoing in the courtyard,
which was decorated with shrines to Catholic saints. In person, Salgado,
who is forty-five, has dark bangs that sweep over a cherubic face with
kohl-rimmed eyes; she has a cheery disposition and a deceptively
guileless manner. Since 2012, she has divided her time between
Washington State and Guerrero, where she was born, in the hope of
helping her town resist an influx of drugs and violence.
For
more than a decade, the Mexican government has been waging war against
organized crime, deploying tens of thousands of troops. That war has
failed; more than a hundred and fifty thousand people have been killed
and another thirty-two thousand have disappeared. Amid the violence, the
government forces have often been no less venal and corrupt than the
drug cartels they were dispatched to fight. In many places, citizens
have grown so distrustful of the security forces that they have formed
armed community self-defense groups to restore order to their battered
towns.
In less than a year, Salgado transformed
a group of untrained local citizens into an armed force that was able
to track down and arrest kidnappers and murderers. Its success helped
inspire a surge of community police; of eighty-one municipalities in
Guerrero, fifty-four now have forces. But the group, founded with the
intention of fighting criminals, had ended up fighting the Mexican
government as well. In 2013, Salgado was arrested, and authorities
accused her of murder, kidnapping, organized crime, and robbery. After
almost three years in prison, she was cleared of charges, but many of
her colleagues still had open arrest warrants. The force, which at one
point had two hundred and forty volunteer officers, was down to eighty,
and they were struggling to keep working.
“Does anyone have questions for Nestora?” Ayala asked the group.
“Compañera
Nestora, the thing that has most stopped us is that we don’t have any
money to operate,” a heavyset man named Calixto Reyes said. “We pay for
everything out of our own pockets and from whatever people give us. And
there are many communities that have requested our support.”
Salgado
urged them not to give up. “The government is trying to stop our work,”
she said. “But we have to continue.” As the community policemen
prepared to begin the night’s patrol, she signed off. “I would like to
send a very strong hug to all of you,” she said. “We will stay in
touch.”
Ayala began chanting the group’s motto: “Respect for our rights—”
The others joined in: “Will bring justice!”
Ayala said, “Vámonos, compañeros,”
and the group walked to two white trucks, emblazoned with the
community-police insignia. They eased their vehicles down a
near-vertical road into town, past kids nestled in doorways and
shopkeepers closing down businesses. Most offered friendly greetings. A
slender man with graying hair flagged them down. “There are some guys
racing on motorcycles here,” he said, waving at the street, which was
wide enough for only one lane of traffic. “They’re using the street as a
drag strip. If you see them, please get them to calm down.”
Around
another corner, the community policemen encountered a group of young
people with a red motorbike, but they turned out not to be the culprits.
“If that was the motorcycle, we would have just taken it,” Julia Silva,
one of two women on patrol that night, joked. “We need them for rapid
response.”
A municipal-police truck passed, and
turned down a parallel street. One of the men looked at the vehicle
with disgust. “The police,” he said. “Whenever they see us out, then
they remember they have a job to do.”
Olinalá
is a modest place of nine thousand people, with sloping streets, a
scenic plaza, and the reddish spectre of mountains looming in the
distance. The town is known for its ornate lacquerware, and the
mountains for fields of poppies. Mexico is the world’s third-largest
producer of opium, and Guerrero grows fifty to seventy per cent of the
country’s poppies; the mountains near Olinalá are among the most
productive regions. When Nestora Salgado was growing up there, the drug
trade was negligible, and the town was poor but safe. “It was
beautiful,” Salgado said. “My family, my friends, everything was there.”
Surrounded by six siblings and many aunts, uncles, and cousins, she
felt that she was related to almost everyone. Her family lived in an
adobe house with a tin roof on a vast farm, and she was free to roam.
Though her mother urged her to “behave like a little woman,” she
preferred to go horseback riding and shoot birds with her brothers. She often came home with bruises and a bloody nose.
Salgado’s
mother, Aurora, had come to Olinalá from a nearby indigenous Tlapanec
village. “People were very discriminatory toward indigenous people,”
Salgado said. “It’s why she didn’t teach us to speak her language. She
thought that if I spoke it people would laugh at me.” Aurora hadn’t gone
to school, but she was intelligent and resourceful. She taught herself
to sew clothes and to make cookware; in addition to taking care of the
children, she helped with planting and harvesting crops. Salgado’s
father, Fernando, a playful, easygoing man with deep-blue eyes, worked
as a farmer and a practitioner of traditional medicine. He housed
patients at the farm while they recuperated, giving them food and a
place to sleep.
When Salgado was twelve, her
mother died, of a heart attack, and her father started disappearing on
drinking binges, sometimes for a week at a time. Not long afterward,
Salgado began spending time with a friend named Miguel, the first boy
she ever liked. He was funny and friendly, and within a few months they
married. She was fourteen and he was nineteen. “My father looked at me
like I was crazy,” she said. “My husband was very scared. He thought my
father wanted to hurt him.” She moved to Miguel’s family farm and soon
had a daughter, Saira. Miguel wouldn’t allow her to return to school,
but she didn’t mind. “I played like a little kid at their house,” she
recalled. Things became harder, though, as she had two more daughters,
Ruby and Grisel. There was very little work outside the farm, and barely
enough money to buy milk for the children. “We had nothing,” Salgado
said.
Miguel
sometimes went to the United States for stints of work, but Salgado
never saw the earnings. “I would be waiting for him, for him to send
money to us,” she said. “I think he was drinking a lot.” So, at
nineteen, she headed to the border, leaving her daughters with her
sister in Mexico City. “It was very hard to leave them,” Salgado
recalled. She had nightmares of her daughters drowning. Salgado had to
cross illegally, running across fields and highways. She was captured,
and sent back to Tijuana by bus. She tried again the next day, and, this
time, she made it to San Diego. During the crossing, though, she lost
Miguel’s phone number. “I didn’t know how I would find my husband,”
Salgado recalled. “I was scared and didn’t know what I was going to do.”
She thought of going home, but she owed money to her coyote—the
smuggler who had helped her cross. A woman who worked for the coyote,
providing meals for the migrants, hired Salgado as a nanny for her young
children.
After three months, Miguel found
her, and the two moved to Bellevue, Washington, where a cousin of his
lived. Miguel worked as a dishwasher. Salgado found a job as a
housekeeper at a hotel, and another at a dry cleaner. “I remember waking
up in the mornings and going to work happy,” she said. “Walking the
streets, I saw everything as beautiful—the plants, the flowers. Olinalá
doesn’t have any parks. I wanted my daughters to see this.” After a
year, she had saved enough money to bring their daughters to Bellevue.
But she had to hire a babysitter while she was at work; Miguel couldn’t
be relied on to watch the children. Salgado would come home to find her
husband drinking with his friends, the kitchen empty of food for their
daughters. Once, the sheriff came to her house to put their belongings
outside because they hadn’t paid rent. “The terrible thing was that I
saw my husband not worrying about anything,” she said. Miguel physically
abused her so viciously that he was eventually sent to prison.
At
twenty-six, she finally left him. She got a job as a waitress, and at
the restaurant where she worked she met a cook from Jalisco named José
Luis Ávila. “My life changed,” Salgado said. Ávila helped her with her
children and the rent. They got married, and eventually moved to Renton,
a small city near Seattle. In 2001, she obtained a residency card, and,
ten years after leaving Olinalá, she was able to return for a visit.
“Everyone was so happy,” she said. “But I was also sad, because I saw
how truly poor my town was.” Salgado began going back every year,
bringing children’s toys, clothes, and other donations she had collected
in Washington. Her daughters didn’t like the town, which seemed too
foreign, too small, too quiet. To Salgado, it was paradise. She
gardened, farmed, and rode horses; on an undeveloped part of her
father’s land, she began building a house.
Yet
the area was becoming increasingly unrecognizable. For years, the
Beltrán Leyva cartel had controlled Guerrero’s opium production. But,
starting in 2009, the government killed or arrested most of its leaders.
With the Beltrán Leyvas gone, and with U.S. demand for heroin rising,
more than a dozen gangs began a fierce struggle for raw material and
transport routes. Their members committed kidnappings and murders; they
took over the commerce of towns, and then forced residents to pay taxes
to them.
The government was little help. Mexico’s then-President, Felipe Calderón, had sent a surge of troops
to the region, but the presence of the military often intensified the
violence. Local forces were no better. Mike Vigil, a former Drug
Enforcement Administration chief of international operations in Mexico
City, told me, “The municipal police were endemic with corruption.” The
drug trade had saturated the government with corruption, and few
politicians evaded it. “You can count them on one hand, the ones who are
clean,” Salgado said. Leaked government documents from 2014 assert that
state security knew of at least twelve mayors in Guerrero who were
connected to organized crime. “This is the true nightmare: that the
enemy, the Mafioso, who is tearing society apart, goes unnoticed in
public office,” Anabel Hernández wrote in the book “Narcoland.”
Guerrero became one of the most violent states in Mexico, with
thousands of killings each year. During my visit, security forces found
six decapitated bodies in a car in the state capital and four tortured
corpses in another town. “A lot of people were scared, but no one said
anything,” Salgado said. “You can’t live like that.”
In the fall of 2012, Salgado’s father fell ill, and she went to Olinalá to care for him. She found the town besieged by sicarios,
or hit men, connected to the Los Rojos gang. Salgado told me that they
operated freely on the streets, shooting guns at all hours of the day.
They kidnapped a hotel owner and extorted money from shopkeepers. A
mother of three told me that, after months of paying protection fees,
she closed her shop. Illicit business proliferated: the sale of bootleg
liquor and cigars, stolen cars and animals. “The police wouldn’t do
anything,” Bernardo Rosendo, who runs an art school in town, told me.
The sicarios acted with such impunity that
some townspeople began to believe that the mayor, Eusebio González
Rodríguez, was tolerating their presence. (González denied this, saying,
“I have always done things within the law.”)
In
the month before Salgado arrived, at least three people had been
murdered. That October, during her visit, a taxi-driver named Cecilio
Morales was kidnapped. A group of people, including her brothers, went
looking for him, and finally found his body near a ravine, his head
smashed in with a rock. “People were really angry,” Salgado recalled. At
the funeral, the next morning, rumors spread that another driver from
the town had been kidnapped. “We were fed up,” Tomás Bello Flores, a
community policeman, told me.
People gathered
in the central plaza, where the town’s church stood amid trimmed shrubs
and palm trees. A few residents rang the church bell, and hundreds more
came to the square to find out what was going on. “That was the moment
that started the movement,” Salgado said. “I was planning how we could
work together to defend ourselves.”
Some
residents had grabbed one suspected criminal and turned him over to the
police, but he was quickly released. “We realized the police were not
going to do anything,” Juan Guevara Ayala, a corn farmer and an uncle of
the missing driver, recalled. As the sun was setting, Salgado and the
other townspeople stopped a police truck near the plaza, and forced the
policemen to get out and turn over their guns. “I felt I was in God’s
hands,” Ayala said. “Whatever would happen would happen.”
For
the next two hours, Salgado drove the truck through town, shouting
through a megaphone, “Come out! You don’t have to be scared!” People
started organizing by neighborhood, and, armed with AK-47s and hunting
rifles from home, and sometimes wearing ski masks, they set up
checkpoints to monitor who was coming in and out of town. “The streets
were packed,” Ayala recalled.
In
less than a year, Salgado transformed a group of untrained citizens
into an armed force that was able to track down and arrest kidnappers
and murderers. “Fear can make you react, or it can flatten you,” she
said. “I am someone who reacts.”
More than a hundred townspeople headed to a house where several of the sicarios
lived, to make them reveal the whereabouts of the second driver. The
men were gone when the group arrived, but the townspeople found a car
and two motorcycles, and torched them. A few days later, one man called
Salgado and reported that a group of men had detained the sicarios’
teen-age girlfriends. Furious, they wanted to take them to the plaza,
douse them in gasoline, and burn them. “I hurried over there,” Salgado
said. “I said to them, ‘What are you doing?’ ” She told them that
killing the girls would just create trouble. Instead, she suggested
questioning them. They had worked as lookouts for the sicarios, and as prostitutes for the men.
The
next day, they picked up the girls from their family homes and took
them to a school, where they had arranged for a lawyer to be present.
The girls told them whom the sicarios were
planning to kidnap (Salgado was on the list) and whom they were working
with: wealthy residents of Olinalá, the head of local government
security, the public prosecutor, and the mayor. (The officials deny
working with the sicarios.) They showed
cell-phone videos of executions that their boyfriends had committed, and
of children being sexually abused. Salgado and the others put the
footage on disks to keep as evidence.
In the sicarios’
home, they discovered shotguns and bulletproof vests, along with a
cache of driver’s licenses from various states in Mexico, declaring that
the men belonged to several branches of the armed forces
simultaneously. Before the townspeople left, Armando Patrón Jiménez, the
town’s public prosecutor, came to collect the items. He
and Salgado had been friendly for years, occasionally going for drinks
together, but the timing of his arrival made her suspicious. “Why?”
Salgado said. “How did he know those things were there?” (Patrón Jiménez
says that he was there as part of a routine investigation, and denies
that there were weapons.)The following week, the governor of Guerrero,
Ángel Aguirre Rivero, came to Olinalá, and Salgado gave him a disk with
the footage from the girls’ cell phones. “I said, ‘That’s why my town
needs community police,’ ” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Oh, yes,
yes—that’s very good. I am proud of you for wanting to provide security
for your people.’ ” But neither he nor the military attempted to arrest
the sicarios. Instead, the governor later
supplied the community police with trucks and uniforms, and recognized
Salgado as head of the force. She was forty-one years old, and had
recently become a grandmother. “He said the security of the town would
now be in my hands,” she said.
Guerrero
has a long history of indigenous revolt. The Sierra Madre del Sur was
often the site of protests against Spanish colonists and
post-independence Presidents. Since then, leftist guerrilla movements
have proliferated in the region, even though the Army has tried to
extinguish them, through extrajudicial killings, abduction, and torture.
In the seventies, the schoolteacher turned revolutionary Lucio Cabañas
lived in the mountains and led a guerrilla group that waged a rebellion
for the poor; they supported themselves through bank robberies and other
crimes against the wealthy and the state. More recently, indigenous
communities have organized grassroots protests against environmentally
hazardous infrastructure projects and the incursion of mining companies
on their land.
Salgado’s force grew out of a
civilian police organization called Coordinadora Regional de Autoridades
Comunitarias-Policía Comunitaria. CRAC-P.C.,
as it is known, was founded, in 1995, to provide security in the place
of hapless or disinterested police and military. It is sanctioned by
Guerrero State Law 701, which recognizes the authority of indigenous
communities to administer themselves, “based on their ancestral customs
and traditions that have been transmitted for generations, enriched and
adapted with the passage of time.” Law 701 also permits a judicial
system “for the prevention and resolution of conflicts” and “to reduce
crime, eradicate impunity, and rehabilitate and reintegrate social
transgressors.” It endorses the idea of collective justice, which is
valued in many indigenous Mexican communities. Under the law, towns with
indigenous and mestizo residents can reconcile perpetrators and victims
in accordance with traditional methods; the community police formed
institutions called casas de justicia, which tried people for minor crimes.
Salgado’s
new force was made up of farmers, ranchers, engineers, doctors,
accountants, and teachers, mostly of indigenous descent. Boys under
eighteen could join if they were married. When Salgado became leader,
some men bristled, but she offered her position to anyone who wanted it,
saying that she would be happy to be just a community policewoman. No
one came forward. “Nestora has more balls than anyone in this town,”
Bernardo Ayala said.
Olinalá has eight
neighborhoods, and Salgado helped arrange for the community policemen to
patrol each one at night. Each policeman took a couple of shifts a
week. Salgado patrolled every night, from nine o’clock until two
o’clock, driving her pickup with policemen in the bed. Her neighbors
donated food, water, trucks, and gas money to her force, and brought hot
coffee and tacos while they patrolled.
Many
nights, Salgado’s force simply insured order on the streets: taking
drunks home, driving sick people and pregnant women to the hospital.
Other work was more serious. They rescued residents who had been
abducted, and arrested people whom they suspected of robbery,
kidnapping, or extortion. Salgado received phone calls from people
threatening to kill her. “A lot of the time, they didn’t have a face,”
she said. “They were ghosts.” Still, the patrols gave her a rush. “We
knew that if these people were able to get us they would tear us to
pieces,” she said. “Fear can make you react, or it can flatten you. I am
someone who reacts.” When she called her family in Washington, she kept
the details of her new life vague; she didn’t want them to worry.
One
afternoon, during her first month leading the force, an eight-year-old
boy disappeared from a nearby town. His father, a butcher, received a
phone call three hours later: the boy had been abducted, and his
kidnappers wanted two million pesos. The parents were afraid. After
realizing that they could not come up with the money, they called their
town’s community police—“No one trusts the municipal police anymore,”
Salgado said—who then called community forces in the surrounding towns.
Salgado and thirty of her men joined a search party of community police
and residents, looking in abandoned houses and ranches, amid the weeds
and the cornfields. One of the searchers, looking near a farm a two-hour
drive from town, heard suspicious sounds, and alerted the community
police. They found the boy there; the men guarding him had fled. “I was
scared, because I knew the sicarios were close and could kill us, but I was happy to see the boy,” Salgado recalled. The kidnappers were later arrested.
Law
701 places few limits on the authority of community police, saying only
that they need to operate within “the framework of respect for human
rights” and “the limits that
the current state of law imposes.” In practice, the state authorities
expected them to act as adjuncts of the municipal police. But Salgado
and her men felt increasingly confident in their parallel system of
justice. Community police forces were reluctant to turn prisoners over
to the government, because officials sometimes allowed suspects to buy
their way out of jail. In Olinalá, Salgado’s force kept detainees on the
top floor of her house, which doubled as her office. “We would just
guard them,” Gustavo Patrón Coronel, a sixty-six-year-old artisan and
community policeman, said. “They were allowed to receive visitors, they
were fed—very much like a regular jail.” After the community police
investigated an offense, the victim was invited to face the accused in
Salgado’s house, and if the latter confessed reparations were arranged.
“Everything had a structure,” Salgado said. When an agreement couldn’t
be reached, she sent detainees to a casa de justicia,
which decided whether to impose “reëducation”—a period in which
prisoners lived in basic facilities while they attended talks and
performed public works, like picking up trash, painting churches, and
cleaning schools.
Although
community police were legally restricted to small rifles, at times they
carried higher-calibre weapons, some of them bought from soldiers
selling surplus arms. “I carried a gun that was not permitted,” Salgado
said—a .38 Super pistol. “If the military had found it, they would have
taken it away.” She wore a bulletproof vest and practiced point-blank
shooting. “We told the government, ‘We’re not going to war with
slingshots. Respect our lives, because our lives mean something, too,’ ”
she went on. “The government wanted us to have sticks, and our enemies
can take down helicopters.”
By the spring of
2013, Salgado was working to organize community police forces throughout
the state. “All the towns within indigenous territory can, within the
law, organize themselves,” she said. “Every eight days, a town would
rise up.” In May, the governor’s office dispatched a former CRAC-P.C. coördinator to tell Salgado that the government didn’t like the way the casas de justicia
were operating and wanted her to limit her work to Olinalá; Salgado
said that he offered her three million pesos to stick to small matters,
such as stolen cattle and family disputes. (The governor declined to
comment.) She refused, saying that the network of towns helped keep the
roads safe. “The government never left us alone,” Bernardo Ayala
recalled. “It was constant harassment.” The security forces intimidated
them as well. “We received direct threats from the Navy,” Juan Ayala
Rendón, a community policeman, said. “They told us that they were going
to kill us, that they were going to disappear us, that they were going
to arrest us.”
Rather than back away from antagonizing officials, CRAC-P.C.
became more aggressive. When a resident called Salgado to complain that
municipal policemen were driving recklessly through town, she and her
men located the chief of police and two officers, who were drunk and
carrying alcohol. They arrested the officers, and confiscated their guns
and their truck. They sent a message to the mayor, but heard back that
he didn’t consider it his problem. (The mayor says that the officers
assured him that they weren’t drunk; in any case, he says, the governor
was responsible for the municipal police.) The next day, representatives
from the state government came to collect the policemen, and then
returned for their arms and their vehicle.
Around that time, four of the teen-age girls who had been involved with the sicarios began disappearing for days at a time, and their mothers came to CRAC-P.C.
for help finding them. In late May, Salgado received a message that the
girls had been found in two nearby towns, with cocaine and marijuana on
them; she arranged for community policemen to bring them home. Their
mothers told Salgado that she should put them in reëducation, but some
members of the community force’s internal council were wary, because the
girls were underage. Salgado told the mothers that they would need to
give written permission. The women provided it, and Salgado took the
girls to the town La Concordia to live at a convent and perform
community service.
Ten days later, Salgado
recalls, one of the mothers returned to her office and said that the
mayor had offered her money to accuse Salgado of kidnapping her
daughter. González denied the bribe, saying that he was responding to
concerns in the community. “These were minors who were detained, and the
pressure was on me, because their families were asking me, ‘You, as
mayor, what are you going to do?’ ” he said. “I had to go to the state
government. It was a serious matter, because unauthorized firearms were
being used, and I had doubts about the legality under which they were
operating.”
The next week, two of the mothers
returned to the office and said that they wanted to take their daughters
home, which Salgado allowed. When she was later arrested, the warrant
claimed that she had unlawfully detained the teen-agers. “I was part of
the recognized state security,” she said. “But the mayor was working
with the governor to put me in jail.”
In
August, 2013, two men from Olinalá were murdered near the border with
the neighboring town of Cualác. The victims were known as criminals, but
they were still members of the community, and their relatives wanted their bodies returned.
The
community policemen learned that police in Cualác had taken the bodies
to a nearby town, Huamuxtitlán, and went to retrieve them. “We all got
together—there were forty or fifty of us in three vehicles,” Patrón
Coronel recalled. “But the bodies were already gone.” The public
ministry in Huamuxtitlán told them that the bodies had been sent on to
the state capital; all that remained was the victims’ truck, riddled
with bullet holes, which was being held at a local impound lot. When the
community police arrived, they found Armando Patrón Jiménez, the public
prosecutor, already there, along with two other men. Salgado says that
they had set fire to papers in the truck, and were trying to push a cow
that had been recovered from the dead men’s vehicle into the bed of
another truck. One of the community policemen recognized the branding on
the cow; it had been stolen from his family ranch a few days earlier.
Salgado confronted the prosecutor and said, “What are you doing?”
Salgado
says that Patrón Jiménez had no ownership papers, which people
typically carry, because cattle rustling is pervasive. She asked why he
was burning evidence, but he didn’t respond. “You know what?” Salgado
said, gesturing at the three men. “Take them away.” Patrón Coronel told
me, “I was very nervous arresting Jiménez. But he was claiming something
that was not his.” As Patrón Jiménez shouted at Salgado’s men, calling
them brutes, they put the suspects in their truck and drove them to a
nearby jail. (Patrón Jiménez denies destroying evidence and stealing the
cow; he maintains that the two dead men had recently bought the animal,
and that he was collecting it to return to their families. “She was a
friend,” he said, of Salgado. “Now she is perverse, a psychopath.”)
The
governor called almost immediately to order Salgado to release Patrón
Jiménez. She refused, insisting that he was guilty of attempted theft
and tampering with crime-scene evidence. “Nestora was always fearless;
she was always running around alone, even though we told her to move
with ten or twelve guys,” Juan Guevara Ayala, a community policeman,
said.
Salgado
was due to return to Renton the following weekend, but, before she
could leave, military personnel spotted her at a gas pump and arrested
her. Several other members of the community police force from Guerrero
were also arrested. José Luis Ávila, Salgado’s husband, learned of her
detention later that day. “When you have family working against
organized crime, you expect something to happen,” Ávila, who has a buzz
cut and a salt-and-pepper mustache, said. “But I thought, Why was she
arrested?” Relatives in Mexico scrambled to obtain news of her. “All we
knew was that she had been taken by soldiers,” Ávila went on. “The
government kept hiding information.” After a day or two, he called the
American Embassy in Mexico and found out that Salgado was in a
maximum-security prison in Nayarit, more than six hundred miles from
Olinalá.
“We aren’t going to live by the law of
the jungle,” Governor Aguirre said at the time. “They can’t go around
armed, from one town to the other. They can’t make arrests for major
crimes. When they detain someone, they have to turn them over directly
to the proper authorities. . . . She refused.”
At
first, Salgado did not even know what the charges against her were. For
months, she was kept in a ten-foot-square cell with stark-white walls
and a bright light that remained on all night. She ate her meals alone
and forced herself to drink the dirty water from the tap. Later, her
lawyer secured permission for her to go onto the patio, but she was not
allowed to talk to the other inmates. Salgado thinks that the prison
authorities were afraid she would organize them. She has lingering pains
in her arms and legs, the result of a car accident, a decade ago, that
left her temporarily paralyzed; she relies on medication to manage her
discomfort, but she was unable to get it. “I suffered a lot in prison
because of the pain,” she said.
In May, 2015,
Salgado went on a hunger strike, restricting herself to water, lime
juice, and honey. After thirty-four days, authorities consented to move
her to the medical wing of a low-security facility in Mexico City, and
she began to eat again. “I survived, thank God,” Salgado said. Still,
Ávila was unable to visit her. “We had to make hard choices, because of
the money,” he said. “I am the one who had to keep working. It was
easier for my daughters to go and visit Nestora.” Ávila travelled
instead to Washington, D.C., to meet with congressional staff members,
asking them to push the State Department to intervene in Salgado’s case.
In those meetings, Ávila tried to convey his wife’s commitment to her
home town. “So many people from Mexico, they come to the United States
and they truly forget where they come from,” he said. “Thank God Nestora
is not one of them. She’s a very strong woman.”
The
charges against Salgado eventually included organized crime, vehicle
theft, homicide, attempted homicide, and fifty-three counts of
kidnapping. Roberto Álvarez, a Guerrero state-security spokesman,
suggested to me that much of CRAC-P.C.’s work was illegal. “They were not arrests—they were detainments. And,
in the reëducation process, the liberty of the detainees was taken
away,” he said. “The community police would ask the families of the
detainees for money in exchange for their freedom.” Mexico’s National
Human Rights Commission found that the community policemen in Olinalá
had subjected twelve prisoners, including four minors, to physical abuse
and inhumane treatment, denying their “right to personal integrity,
dignified treatment, sexual freedom, and the right to a life without
violence.”
Salgado’s first two lawyers, one
state-appointed and the other from the indigenous-rights organization
Tlachinollan, had difficulty even accessing files related to the
government charges. Nine months passed before a lawyer could visit her.
“He was not allowed to bring a single piece of paper, and he was allowed
to speak with Nestora for only forty-five minutes,” Ávila said. “How
can you defend somebody like that?” Ávila recruited Thomas Antkowiak,
the director of the International Human Rights Clinic, at the Seattle
University School of Law. “Her rights had been violated,” Antkowiak told
me. “This persecution against social activists, against human-rights
defenders, against indigenous leaders, is happening all over Mexico.” In
late 2013, he filed a petition to the United Nations Working Group on
Arbitrary Detention, seeking to establish that Salgado’s imprisonment
was illegal; Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission declared that it
had found violations of Salgado’s right to due process. In the meantime,
Salgado’s fame began to grow. “Nestora became a symbol of social rage,”
Abel Barrera, the director of Tlachinollan, said. “She had to expose
the relationships between the authorities and organized crime, and, for
the state authorities of Guerrero, she went too far. For the people who
were defenseless against organized crime, she did what she had to do.”
Salgado’s
defenders portrayed her case as a matter of political persecution. “She
touched on the interests of the governor and the mayor,” Amanda Rivero,
one of her Mexican lawyers, said. “The only way to stop the community
police was to arrest Nestora.” The state alleged that Salgado forced
business owners to help pay for her group’s operations; she says that
she held fund-raisers but never coerced anyone. Her colleagues on the
force said that they had not asked for ransoms; instead, they collected
retribution fines, which were paid to victims. One of the people Salgado
allegedly kidnapped and tortured, a man named Francisco Flores Jiménez,
told the Mexican press that his rights were respected during the
reëducation process, and that his family was never asked for a ransom.
He also claimed that the young women who accused Salgado of kidnapping
were treated well, and were there with the consent of their parents;
Salgado’s attorneys entered the signed permission slips into evidence.
None of the victims named by the prosecution showed up in court.
In
March, 2016, after Salgado had been incarcerated for two years and
eight months, a state court cleared her of all charges. Immediately, the
attorney general of Guerrero issued three new warrants, with further
counts of murder, kidnapping, robbery, and organized crime. Soon
afterward, I met Salgado in an empty office at Penal de Tepepan, a
women’s prison on the southern edge of Mexico City. Salgado had a cold,
and she huddled into a brown leather couch in a neon-green sweatshirt
and black leggings. She feared what the government would do to her, but
she was optimistic: she felt that she would soon be home with her
family, in Renton. “For sure, I will leave here soon,” she said.
Salgado’s
daughter Grisel calls her “strong-headed,” pointing out that, when her
children expressed concern over her work, she replied that she would
rather die fighting than live on her knees. But things had changed. She
stayed in the clinic as much as she could; she was nervous about
encountering other prisoners. Misinformation about her was so widespread
that some inmates thought she was implicated in the disappearance of
forty-three teacher trainees in Ayotzinapa—an incident that had occurred
while she was imprisoned. Women had called her profane names in the
corridors. “It’s dangerous for me to be in the general population,
because people look at me like the enemy,” she said.
In
her cell were piles of books from supporters: a biography of the
indigenous guerrilla Lucio Cabañas (“My idol”), a history of Catholic
nuns, a book on the Zapatistas, Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist.”
But she found it hard to concentrate on reading. “Your mind is always
thinking about why they think you’re a criminal, why they put you
inside,” she said. It all felt like a plot to drive her insane. She
wrote in a journal, and tried to avoid the news.
Three
days later, she learned that the court had found her innocent: again,
the victims named in the arrest orders hadn’t showed up. Salgado walked
out of the prison in an olive-green polo shirt with the CRAC-P.C.
logo and a matching baseball cap. Outside, amid a throng of supporters,
community policemen from around Guerrero had assembled in two rows
extending to the street. In bright sunshine, the men saluted. “They all
recognized me as their commander,” she said. “It was beautiful.” One of
them brought out handcuffs, which she put on and then dramatically
pulled apart, as the crowd cheered. “I am free, thanks to the
townspeople,” she told them. “Thank you for your struggle. Thank you for
believing in me.”
Salgado heard little news from
Olinalá in prison, but she knew that the movement she had helped to
revive was troubled. Across Mexico, vigilante militias, called autodefensas,
had formed, and were operating outside the law. Some were opportunists,
taking advantage of the chaos to carry out illegal activities; some had
been infiltrated by the cartels, which used them to expand operational
bases and to attack rivals. “Once the vigilante groups established
control, they began to criminalize themselves,” Steven Dudley, a
co-director of Insight Crime, which investigates organized crime in the
Americas, said. “People started to realize many of them weren’t what
they were saying they were.” As violence increased throughout the
region, popular support waned. The government saw an opportunity for
political advantage. It began working to disarm some of the autodefensas, while integrating others into a “rural defense corps” and hailing their work as an example of effective local justice.
Around Olinalá, some of the corrupt autodefensas falsely claimed to work with CRAC-P.C.—a
dangerous situation, because the community police could be caught
between the government and the cartels. “We’ve had threats in our own
homes, phone calls, and we’ve heard comments on the streets,” Calixto
Reyes, the community policeman, said. They patrolled only occasionally,
and believed that the sicarios had moved
back into town. “Some people are still trying to do something, but
everyone is afraid now, and they don’t have any support from the
government,” Anabel Hernández said. “It is not enough to fight them
alone.”
There were people in Olinalá who felt
that Salgado had brought trouble to the town. “Just because no one
follows the law doesn’t mean you can make up your own law,” Bernardo
Rosendo, who runs the art school, said. He was friendly with both
Salgado and Patrón Jiménez, the prosecutor she had arrested. “She should
have taken Patrón Jiménez to the authorities with proof. He was being
punished under a law we had never heard of. How can you have a state
within a state?” For some, it rankled that Salgado was free while
several of her colleagues were still imprisoned. Among them was Gonzalo
Molina, a CRAC-P.C. leader in
the town of Tixtla, who was arrested after he protested Salgado’s
detention by leading his force to disarm the Tixtla municipal police.
Like others, he blames Salgado for not doing more to negotiate his
freedom.
Not long after Salgado was released, I
met her at her family’s apartment in Renton, a plain, comfortable place
in a quiet neighborhood. The walls of the living room were filled with
photos and illustrations of Salgado, sent by well-wishers; her children
and grandchildren wandered in and out. Sitting on the couch, Salgado
said that her intentions had been good: “We tried to bring peace to the
town, to care for and protect everyone. We didn’t want to start a war.”
(Rosendo put it another way: “No matter what happens, she has the
conviction that she did what she had to do, and that it was the right
thing to do.”) Salgado went on, “I did so many good things in my town. A
lot of people liked me. The government accused me of so many things I
didn’t do. Now they have accepted that I was within the law, but they
took almost three years.”
Eusebio González
Rodríguez, the mayor of Olinalá, told me that, while he respected
Salgado, he found the actions of the community police dubious. “I always
told the government of Guerrero that if it was authorizing self-defense
groups then it would have to control them. It’s a situation that
spiralled out of the state government’s control,” he said. “I didn’t
agree with the fact that there was no limit to the community police’s
function.”
The state still maintains that
Salgado is a criminal; the Guerrero prosecutor has appealed her release.
Álvarez, the state-security spokesman, said, “Even though she acted
within Law 701, she went against the constitutional precepts that
protect human rights.” Wary of the power that the law gives indigenous
civilian forces, politicians have proposed that it be revised to
regulate their work.
Salgado argues that crime
fell dramatically while the community police were working in Olinalá and
the surrounding towns. “There was nowhere for criminals to hide,” she
said. “Yes, they can be selling drugs, but not in plain sight, like they
used to.” State authorities also believe that the town’s security
improved; they say that reports of crime actually increased, but suggest
that it was because people felt more comfortable alerting authorities.
And recent events have lent credence to Salgado’s charges of government
malfeasance. In October, 2014, Aguirre, the governor, resigned amid
outrage over the disappearance of the teacher trainees in Ayotzinapa. In
his last days in office, he claimed that many of the municipal police
forces were working with the cartels; the federal government has since
disbanded a third of Guerrero’s municipal police departments. Rogelio
Ortega, the interim governor of Guerrero, who replaced Aguirre, called
the imprisonment of community policemen “a case of political prisoners.”
Salgado
talks at times about going back to police work, although if she
returns, she risks being detained by the government or killed by
revenge-seekers. Ávila said he would support her. “We have many
abandoned little towns in Guerrero, because people have been forced to
leave,” he said. “We need to keep fighting.” He considered for a moment.
“Of course, the day she decides to go back to Olinalá I’m going to worry a lot.”
In
her living room, Salgado told me that she still fervently believed in
the need for community police. “It’s the only choice people have in
Guerrero,” she said. “They know that we can be in charge of our own
security.” She shrugged. The cracks in her assurance were starting to
show. “If they don’t want to do it, that’s on them,” she said. “But it’s
the only option that we have.” ♦
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