One of the founders of Mexico’s “self-defense” movement, the lime farmer turned vigilante crusader Hipólito Mora, has been murdered in an ambush – the latest macabre chapter in the country’s unabating crime conflict.
Guillermo Valencia, a politician from the violence-stricken state of Michoacán, where Mora helped launch a rural revolt against narco-traffickers 10 years ago, announced the news on Twitter.
“It’s just been confirmed to me that they have murdered my friend #HipolitoMora, they torched his bulletproof truck and killed all his bodyguards,” Valencia tweeted.
Video footage posted on social media showed the burning wreckage of what was identified as Mora’s vehicle in La Ruana, the rural community where he lived.
Mexico’s self-defense movement was born in 2013 as charismatic leaders including Mora and the doctor turned paramilitary leader José Manuel Mireles Valverde urged civilians to take up arms against the brutal narco cartels seizing control of huge swaths of the country.
Initially many Mexicans hailed such groups as noble saviours, although over the following years some were accused of human rights abuses or were co-opted by the cartels and became involved in criminal activity themselves.
In February 2022, the Guardian sat down with Mora at a hotel in Michoacán’s state capital, Morelia, as his rifle-toting guards loitered outside. The 66-year-old insisted he had stepped back from the vigilante movement but vowed never to abandon the farming community where he was born and raised. He said only two things could stop him speaking out about the organized crime groups which have plunged that region – and much of Mexico – into carnage.
The first was for there to be a dramatic improvement in the security situation, “so we are able to come and go … as we please without running the risk of being grabbed by hitmen”.
“The other, which I think is how they will try to silence me, is murdering me,” Mora added.
Asked if he believed Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had any hope of pacifying their country, which la
