Former Mexican community leader Hipólito Mora, who drove a drug cartel out of the western state of Michoacán, was killed in an armed attack, state authorities said Thursday.
Mora was one of the last surviving leaders of the armed movement of Michoacán self-defense in which farmers and ranchers joined to drive the Knights Templar cartel out of the state in 2013-2014.
The activist was one of the few fighters who remained in his hometown after the fight taking care of his lime crops. In recent years, Mora complained that many security forces were infiltrated by the cartels and that gang violence was worse than ever. In 2014, a son of Mora’s was killed by a drug gang.
Gregorio López, a Catholic priest who accompanied and participated in the self-defense movement of that time, remembered Mora as “a corruptible man, an authentic voice, a born leader.”
All the leaders of the movement were in constant danger and López was known to wear a bulletproof vest while celebrating mass.
Mora usually traveled in an armored jeep accompanied by a group of bodyguards, some of them former vigilantes who had been hired as police officers.
Around noon on Thursday, when the activist was returning with his escort from working on his farm and heading home in a Tahoe truck, they were intercepted on Hiquíngare street in his hometown of La Ruana by a group of armed people who They blocked their way with two trucks. They started shooting at him and set fire to one of the units before fleeing the scene, the Michoacán Attorney General’s Office said in a statement.
He was guarded by security elements in another vehicle.
Shortly after, the security forces arrived at the scene and found Mora’s body in the vicinity of a burned-out truck, which had burns on most of the body. Inside another van, the bullet-ridden bodies of two uniformed people were found, and another victim, also in uniform, was located on the street.
The leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Michoacán, Guillermo Valencia, told the PA Mora’s relatives confirmed that the activist was murdered along with his bodyguards. “He was always threatened.” Valencia assured that Mora “was a hindrance to criminals… Someone who was not afraid to denounce what was happening.”
Falko Ernst, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, affirmed that Mora’s criticisms of security strategies were correct and that the policies followed by successive state and federal administrations have not brought peace to Michoacán. The assassination of the activist, he indicated, is a sample of this.
The first time that journalists from PA interviewed Mora in 2013, he and his followers in La Ruana had been cut off from the outside world by Knights Templar gunmen.
Tired of the kidnappings, threats, and demands for payment from criminals, who also decreed when farmers could harvest their lemons, who they could sell them to, and what price they would get, the townspeople rose up in arms.
Mora led a movement that erected makeshift stone barricades and hung banners on the access roads to the town with the legend “SOS, Women and children in danger!”.
After the self-defense groups resisted the cartel alone for months, the Mexican military finally arrived to rescue them.
Mora was even briefly imprisoned by the government and later ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for deputy and governor of his state. He often spoke of the feeling that he knew he could die, but he never betrayed his move.
In 2022, Mora told the PA that the situation in Michoacán was worse than when he led peasants from his hometown in the fight to oust the Los Caballeros Templarios cartel in 2013. That cartel was largely dismantled, but was replaced by the Viagras cartel that has since so it has continued kidnapping, killing and extorting farmers and companies.
“In terms of security, we are worse than ever,” Mora said in 2022, after a meeting with senior government officials in Mexico City to demand more protection for Michoacán.
He complained that the federal government had been fighting a raid by the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel in Michoacán, but had done little to combat local cartels like the Viagras.
“You have to fight all the cartels, you shouldn’t fight just one,” Mora said then.
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