Mexico's Guerrero state teeters on the edge of chaos

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-mexico-guerrero-trouble-20140216,0,7998993.story



Mexico's Guerrero state teeters on the edge of chaos
By Richard Fausset
February 16, 2014, 9:05 a.m.

CHILPANCINGO, Mexico — On a cool evening in February, Pioquinto Damian, the head of the Chamber of Commerce here in Guerrero's capital city, was locked away in his downtown apartment, afraid to step outside.

He was convinced that the mayor had tried to kill him in an ambush just a few days before. In response, the governor had assigned him 18 heavily armed police officers as bodyguards.

A few miles outside town, hundreds of members of autodefensas — vigilante "self-defense" militias composed largely of fed-up farmworkers — were patrolling the streets of semirural suburbs with ancient rifles and shotguns, hoping to rid them of the drug cartel thugs who had terrorized them for years.

Such is the latest trouble in the heart of Guerrero, a historically unruly southwestern state that last year suffered the highest number of homicides in Mexico, and the second-highest number of kidnappings. It could also become the next state to slide deep into chaos and create major problems for President Enrique Peña Nieto as he strives to project the image of a nation returning to peace after years of cartel violence.