Mexican Vigilantes Fight Drug Cartel Violence

[From article]
There was the humiliation of watching gangsters speed around town in fancy trucks, shut down streets for drunken parties or beat to death an elderly man who scolded them. There were kidnappings and executions. Then there was the gang’s ruthless, mafia-like control of almost every facet of the local economy, down to a street-side taco stand.
The area’s lime growers, for example, were taxed by metrics that included acreage, limes harvested and crates packed. The meager wages of the lime pickers were also taxed, along with the bus fares that they paid to get to the groves. Gang members taxed sacks of corn and the tortillas made from them. A man installing a floor in his house soon had a gang member at his door, demanding a fee. A man who ran a restaurant said the cartel began taking a cut of the coins in his jukebox.
[. . .]
Locals said that they filed complaints and pointed out the gangsters to local authorities but that nothing ever happened.
“The government never saw them around here,” said Pimentel, explaining his view that local officials were corrupted by the cartel and ignored residents’ complaints. “We couldn’t take it any longer. We held until our last breath.”
This sounds awfully like Cambridge and the state of Massachusetts. It is also how the Boston office of the FBI operated. Civilians would complain about James Bulger's criminal activities to the FBI. The FBI agent in charge of organized crime would relay the names of the complainants to Bulger who would kill them. The FBI has not been scrutinized or cleansed  of its insitutional corruption. 
[. . .]
America is now a nation ruled -- and that is the correct word -- by a self-appointed elite of ignorant snobs and power-mad degenerates to compete with the worst ruling castes of the civilized world. The U.S. federal government has, through the deliberate deteriorations of a century, finally dispensed with all but the flimsiest pretense of the principles of limited government and the rule of law that virtually defined America's historic political achievement. By turns Commodus, Nero, and Caligula, today's American ruling elite steer an intentionally debased, demoralized and indoctrinated majority down the path to a form of enslavement as non-metaphorical as it is ingenious, the kind foreseen by Tocqueville as "soft despotism." Never to be misunderstood is that by "soft," Tocqueville did not mean weak; he meant achieved through enticements, rather than through brute force. This tyranny, he warned, might be more thorough than any "hard" despotism, in that the populace so enticed will welcome the chains, rather than resist them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-the-hills-of-michoacan-self-defense-groups-battle-a-mexican-drug-cartel/2013/09/09/6947e47a-119f-11e3-a2b3-5e107edf9897_story.html

In Mexico, self-defense groups battle a cartel
Washington Post
By Stephanie McCrummen
Published: September 9, 2013