"Los Rojos" and "Los Ardillos" Busy Displacing Citizens in Chilapa,Gro

Translated by Yaqui for Borderland Beat from Milenio

Special Report By: Melissa del Pozo

Aug 21, 2017

After two months of exile, Margarita López has returned home. Her  home, in Ahuihuiyuco, municipality of Chilapa, Guerrero, looks "more unkempt," she says. Her husband died, the dogs were eaten, and two horses disappeared. "That's what we were going to eat, now that we owe money," she says, feeding the few chickens that survive him.

Margarita's family left their home on June 9, when criminals warned the inhabitants that they would kill any settlers in this region if they stayed on. The threats rained down on them in papers that they threw in the plaza in front of the church, the Zocolo of Ahuihuiyuco. Then, psychosis spread through social networks and on June 10 Ahuihuiyuco and Tepozcuautla were deserted. More than 580 families moved.

"Living outside is very expensive, that's why we returned," says Margarita. "I left with my two daughters-in-law, one of my grandchildren and all my children, we left everything, the little we have."

"First some boys were dead, they left them here at night and then all the people started to leave and I went and told my children, let's go, why should we would stay here alone? What about the crooks or if  there was a confrontation," recalls Mrs. López, who makes mezcal in one of the two rooms of her house made of sheets of metal and wood. 

For three years, the Municipality of Chilapa has been land without law. The dispute is over the cultivation and transport of the poppy crop and its derivatives between two criminal groups, "Los Ardillos" and "Los Rojos", and has claimed the lives of more than 500 people, according to the organization Siempre Vivos, and a similar number have disappeared.

 Its director, Jose Diaz Navarro, says that crimes are increasingly bloody. "We talk about people who are dismembered, they cut them up  and are  left in bags. Most of the time they are men or women who did not want to work for one or another criminal organization."

Diaz joined the group in the wake of the disappearance of his brothers Hugo and Alejandrino in November 2014. Since then he has documented the disappearance of people in the municipality, week after week. " In just these four days I was informed that we already have five people missing in Chilapa and another in Zitlala, but the authorities do nothing, the criminals continue to control everything and they are free, even the plaza boss," he explains.

"Los Ardillos" have managed to take control of Zitlala, Ahuacuotzingo, Atlixtlat, José Joaquín de Herrera, Quechultenango, Mochitlan, Tixtla, Apango and the municipal head of Chilapa. All communities before were in the possession of "Los Rojos". The advance of "Los Ardillos'' is attributed, according to Diaz, to the protection of that was enjoyed during the  last  tenure of the local Government officials.

Bernando Ortega, Celso's brother, "La Ardilla", founder of the organization, was leader of the PRD bench in the local Congress. He has also been mayor of Quechultenango.

"The Ardillos" have taken over the economy, they also extort money from the city council, merchants and  take over businesses, that's why it's organized crime," José explains: "And if someone refuses to collaborate with them, they threaten them. The good ones or the bad ones ". People from other communities have the same thing, but more with "Los Rojos". Then there are  the people in the middle.

Hence, many of the inhabitants of these communities live with permanent threats and, as in Ahuihuiyuco and Tepozcuautla, leave their homes. Senora Gabriela has lost three of her relatives. Two years ago, her  uncle and her  cousin were kidnapped. "Since November 2015 I do not know about them, they took them because they did not want to work with the bad guys," she says in anonymity.

Last May, Gabriela's brother disappeared. "The next day we went, we left town, with what we had, only with important documents.  The fear, the deaths, the disappearances, when nothing happens in the immediate family, because it has more value, but relatives began to disappear."

Gabriela, her mother, two of her brothers, her husband and her two children, one and five years old, paid 2,000 Pesos to rent a house in Chilapa for three nights. "I had no bathroom facilities nor light/electricity and with 2,000 Pesos we could eat two weeks, my two children and I," says Gabriela.

Impossible economically, Gabriela and her family took refuge with relatives in another state of the Mexican Republic. A week ago they decided to return to Tepozcuautla. The money was gone. She and her family live in a modest house, too. Like Margarita, her family harvests maize, beans, tomatoes and chile. When they got home, their dining room table was gone and some plastic chairs they had paid for.

They were left without part of their meager rural patrimony: their pig and their hens had disappeared.

Manuel Olivares, director of the José María Morelos and Pavón Human Rights Center, explains that as Gabriela, the 580 families who left these communities did so in a disorganized way, the first 300 in May and the rest after the public threats, between June 7 -10th. 

"Those who are returning, do so in total anonymity and with much fear."

 On June 14, Guerrero Coordination Group spokesman Roberto Heredia reportedly claimed that the displaced had returned to these communities and were  enjoying all the security guarantees by sending military and state police to these regions. However, the census of the Centro José María Morelos y Pavón showed that not 50 percent of the villagers have returned to their homes.

 "The people who have returned have not done so in safety because there are  no health services, there are no services at all, businesses are closed, there is nothing and while people are afraid there are signs that there is a latent risk even with the presence of the Army," says Olivares.

The health centers are closed in both communities and the school cycle started with few teachers. Those displaced by fear, some of them, are  beginning to return. They just ask for protection.