At first, the amateur video shows a normal evening in the seething valley town of Apatzingn, in Mexico’s western Michoacn state. But as residents and stall owners mix jovially on the sidewalk, the calm is broken by the sudden, sinister appearance of masked men gripping machine guns mounted on more than 50 pickup trucks, Hummers and Jeeps. The gangsters cruise openly down Apatzingn’s main drag, a frightening show of force even by the brutal standards of Mexico’s drug-war bloodbath. The propaganda video was sent to media outlets by the newest players in that conflict, the bizarrely named Caballeros Templarios, or the Knights Templar. As the name suggests, these narcos are inspired by the Jerusalem-based crusaders who fought in the name of Christ between 1119 and 1312, when the Pope banned them. But unlike their medieval idols, these thugs cook up methamphetamines, or crystal meth, and have left scores of mutilated corpses strewn about Michoacn since emerging as a group in March.
Anyone who follows Mexico’s mayhem, which has resulted in almost 40,000 gangland murders since 2007, will find the news of drug-dealing Christian zealots unsettlingly familiar. The Knights are a breakaway group from the “narco-evangelical” cartel known as La Familia — which burst onto the scene in Michoacn five years ago by throwing five severed heads onto a discotheque dance floor. La Familia’s criminal and spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno, alias El Mas Loco, or The Craziest One, even wrote his own “bible” of religious ramblings, which was compulsory reading for his troops. President Felipe Caldern, himself from Michoacn, sent thousands of federal troops to stop the psychopathic gang from unleashing what it called Old Testament justice on everyone from rivals to politicians. In December, federal police allegedly shot Moreno dead; on June 21, police arrested his No. 2, Jos de Jess Mndez, alias El Chango, or The Monkey. As The Monkey was paraded before reporters on Wednesday, Mexican police said La Familia had been devastated — a vindication of Caldern’s controversial military campaign against the cartels.
But the rise of the Knights Templar from the ashes of La Familia shows the fundamental problem of the drug war: whenever one set of bad guys is taken down, another steps up to take their place, largely because Mexico has few if any real investigative police institutions to halt the vicious cycle. The Knights are purportedly headed by an old lieutenant of Moreno, Servando Gmez, a former school teacher from Michoacn’s rugged hills, where meth labs abound like hillbilly stills. Mexican police files show that both Moreno and Gmez converted to Evangelical Christianity while migrants in the United States in the 1990s. Returning to Mexico, they found religious discipline was a useful tool to keep criminal troops in line.
Like La Familia, the Knights claim to be pious and patriotic protectors of the Michoacn community even as they traffic and murder. When they first announced themselves last spring, they hung more than 40 narco-manteles, or drug-cartel banners, across the state with a message promising security. “Our commitment is to safeguard order, avoid robberies, kidnapping, extortion and to shield the state from rival organizations,” they said. A week later, their first victim was hanged from an overpass with a note claiming he was a kidnapper.
