Mourning begins for anti-gang community defense activist slain in Mexico

Family and acquaintances of anti-gang community defense activist Hipólito Mora are gathering at his home to pay their respects after he was found killed not far away from his house

On the dirt road where Hipólito Mora, leader of an armed civilian defense movement, was killed only a large, charred spot on the ground remained Friday where his armored vehicle had burned.

There was no visible presence of the National Guard, soldiers or police.

At his home, a short distance away, about 15 people sat in chairs before Mora’s flower-covered casket on a patio. Dozens of additional chairs awaited others expected to come pay their respects.

Mora was one of the last surviving leaders of Michoacan’s armed vigilante movement, in which farmers and ranchers banded together to expel the Knights Templar cartel from the state between 2013 and 2014.

The Michoacan state prosecutors' office on Thursday said unidentified gunmen cut off Mora’s vehicle and his bodyguards’ pickup on a street in his hometown La Ruana. They opened fire, riddling Mora’s vehicle with bullets, and then set it afire, the office said.

Three other men, believed to be members of his security detail, were also killed. Prosecutors said one of the four corpses matched Mora’s description.

Guadalupe Mora Chávez, Mora’s brother, said Friday that he had seen armed men driving around La Ruana earlier Thursday and called his brother to warn him. He said his brother told him he was aware.

Mora Chávez said he lives beside the military base for the army and National Guard troops and he climbed onto his roof to see over the base wall. There was no one inside.

They had left the base early Thursday and never arrived to the scene of the attack, which lasted nearly an hour, he said. He does not believe it was coincidence.

“They left in agreement with them (the attackers) so that they could come him and kill them,” he said.

Hipólito Mora never had the support of the government that left the communities of the region to protect themselves from organized criminal groups.

“They have to remember him as a leader, a leader who fought for his people, but unfortunately this government didn’t support him, it was against him,” Mora Chávez said.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Mora’s killing was very regrettable, but he also said that violence in the state had antecedents. He then embarked on one of his preferred lectures about how former President Felipe Calderón launched the war on drugs from the very state of Michoacan.

In response to a question during his daily news briefing Friday the president said, “That is a remnant of the violence that the government sponsored and allowed.”

López Obrador also complained that the case was receiving so much media attention, and called coverage of Mora's killing alarmist and hypocritical.

He said security forces were in the area and Mora had bodyguards and an armored vehicle, but “it was not possible to prevent them from killing him.”

Michoacan Gov. Alfredo Ramírez had asked Mora to leave La Ruana for his own safety, López Obrador said the governor had told him.