Knights Templar Pictures

The Crusaders of Meth: Mexico's Deadly Knights Templar

At first, the amateur video shows a normal evening in the seething valley town of Apatzingán, in Mexico's western Michoacán state. But as residents and stall owners mix jovially on the sidewalk, the calm is broken by the sinister appearance of masked men gripping machine guns mounted on more than 50 pickup trucks, Hummers and Jeeps. The gangsters cruise openly down Apatzingán'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 (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, at which point the Pope disbanded them. But unlike their medieval idols, these thugs cook up methamphetamines, or crystal meth, and have left scores of mutilated corpses strewn about Michoacán since their emergence 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 Michoacana, which burst onto the scene in Michoacán five years ago by throwing five severed heads onto a discotheque dance floor. La Familia's criminal and spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno, a.k.a. el Más Loco (the Craziest One), even wrote his own bible of religious ramblings, which was compulsory reading for his troops. Mexican President Felipe Calderón, himself from Michoacán, 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, José de Jesús Méndez, whose alias was el Chango (the Monkey). As the Monkey was paraded before reporters on June 22, Mexican police said La Familia had been devastated — a vindication of Calderón'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 its 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's, Servando Gómez, a former schoolteacher from Michoacán's rugged hills, where meth labs abound like hillbilly stills. Mexican police files show that both Moreno and Gómez converted to Evangelical Christianity when they were migrants in the U.S. in the 1990s. Returning to Mexico, they found that religious discipline was a useful tool to keep criminal troops in line.

tiobonchiebi: Pictures Of Knights Templar

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