Drug cartel declares itself religious force fighting tyranny

Published on Wednesday 20 July 2011 18:36

A MEXICAN organised crime group calling itself the Knights Templar is distributing booklets saying it is fighting a war against poverty, tyranny and injustice.

Federal police said they seized copies of the cartel's "code of conduct" booklet during an arrest of cartel members in the western state of Michoacan last week.

A copy of the 22-page The Code of the Knights Templar of Michoacan, illustrated with knights on horseback bearing lances and crosses, says the group "will begin a challenging ideological battle to defend the values of a society based on ethics".

The Knights Templar have been blamed for murders, extortion, drug trafficking and attacks on police. Analysts say the propaganda is a bid to transform a drug cartel into a social movement, along the lines of what right-wing paramilitary groups did in Colombia in the 1990s against Marxist rebels.

"I think the main intent is to create a social base in Michoacan…and that way they are different from other criminal organizations," said Jorge Chabat, a veteran analyst of the drug trade in Mexico.

"They say they are defending the people against attacks. In the case of Colombia it was the guerrillas; here it is against who knows what."

The Knights Templar was founded in March, according to the booklet, whose illustrations were lifted from the website of US-based Bristish artist Mark Churms, a website of a company that sells swords and another promoting the 2007 Swedish film Arn: The Knight Templar. "God is the truth and there is no truth without God," reads one passage in the booklet.

Named after a medieval Roman Catholic order of religious warriors, Knights Templar is a splinter group of La Familia, another cult-like cartel whose leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, published a motivational pamphlet called The Sayings of the Craziest One.

The Mexican government claims to have all but dismantled La Familia since Moreno was killed by federal police last December and another founder, Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas, was arrested last month.

But the killing has continued in Michoacan, as Knights Templar gunmen battle both the Zetas cartel and La Familia for control of President Felipe Calderon's home state more.

More than 35,000 people have died in drug violence across Mexico since then 2006, according to government figures, and some groups put the number at more than 40,000.