MEXICO CITY (AP) - After months of tacit cooperation with rural vigilantes trying to drive out a cult-like drug cartel, the Mexican government has moved to permanently solve one of its toughest security problems with a plan to legalize the growing movement and bring it under the army's control.
But the risks are high.
To succeed, the government must enforce military discipline and instill respect for human rights and due process among more than 20,000 heavily armed civilians before returning them home to the western state of Michoacan.
In other Latin American countries, similar experiments have created state-backed militias that carried out massive human rights abuses as armed civilians turned to vengeance, or assisted in mass killings. The Mexican army itself has been accused of rights abuses during the more than seven-year war against organized crime that has seen it deployed as a police force in much of the country.
Vigilante leaders met Tuesday with government officials to hash out details of the agreement that would put avocado and lime pickers with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles under army command. The Mexican military has a century-old tradition of mobilizing "rural defense corps" of peasants to fight bandits and uprisings in the countryside.
If the latest experiment works, it will resolve one of the thorniest dilemmas of the barely year-old administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto: how to handle a movement that sprang up outside the law but successfully took on a pseudo-religious drug cartel, the Knights Templar, which Mexican authorities had been unwilling or unable to take on for years.
Over the last year, the vigilantes, many former migrant workers who spent years in the United States, have seized a dozen towns terrorized by extortion, killings and rapes at the hands of the cartel's gunmen. Members of the Knights Templar have tried to portray themselves as soldiers in a reincarnation of a medieval religious order dedicated to Christianity and the expulsion of abusive police from their communities.