2011 06 15

I rather hesitate to relate this story, but I think you are all adults and can handle it.  And I don't think I shall suffer any repercussions.  Astute readers will remember that three local hoodlums came calling when I lived on the Ranch, and that I thwarted an effort to break into the main house.  I think they were responsible for poisoning the last three dogs, which in my books is a cardinal sin, too.  Well, what goes around...

During about a year after I left,  houses were broken into and things went missing.  One of the pendejos responsible  - for the break-ins after I left and the attempted break-in at the Ranch - was found dead, but the other two carried on.  Until about a year later, when, stark naked,  they were whipped many times around the zocalo by men wielding boards with nails in.  They were refused treatment at the local clinic, and have not been seen around since.  I think they got off lightly, but here's the rub:  it was not the police who administered punishment, it was the state-wide narco-familia, La Familia.

This group, whose name I don't want to use to often during this tale, is an interesting mix of contradictions: they present themselves as being devout members of the Church;  they act as the police force in the small towns in the state; they dumped 25 dead people into an abandoned mine; they sell hard drugs to 10-year-olds; they probably have more money than the national government; they kill and/or assassinate police officers and federal agents.  So you see the dilemma:  I applaud the result but abhor the method.  People in Quiringuicharo generally have very little. They are inter-related in the extreme, they help one another with everything and they mainly focus on getting through life as best they can.  Family members, often in the US 'under the radar', send home what they can, which is often not a lot but is more than they could earn here.  To have these evil little bastards breaking into homes and stealing what little the residents - probably their relatives - have, is more offensive to me than the more anonymous crime in places like LA.  Some crime should be punished and the situation causing the rest of them should be remedied.  There is more of a social network here than in the US, so people can get some subsistence money, and are entitled to medical care because they were born here.  Families will pull together - which is probably where the name of the narcos comes from.

The situation reeks of vigilante justice, but the fact that these three tried to break into the house I was calling home deeply offended me, and I can't whole-heartedly condemn the instrument of retribution.  What do you think?