“People don’t go out on the street because they’re afraid of the government,” said Graciela Piñeda, whose 21-year-old son, Martin Garcia, was the second of her boys to be killed by authorities in the past three years.
At the makeshift shrine for the Warriors of the Five, the young men are listed by their gang handles: Chicken. Nacho. Whitey. In the photos, some have elaborate tattoos, others brandish guns.
Eleven of the men killed by police this month in one of the deadliest clashes of Mexico’s drug war came from the blocks of Infonavit 5, a poor bar-and-brothel neighborhood in this farming town in Jalisco state. The relatives and neighbors who stop to pay tribute don’t dispute that at least some of them may have worked for the New Generation drug cartel. But that label means little here.
They don’t see them as gangsters but as childhood friends who guarded homes, watched parked cars, kept drunks from disrespecting the women. It’s the police, they say, who will take things from the corner store without paying, shake you down on your walk home, make your 12-year-old daughter unbutton her shirt.
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