EL GUAYABO, Michoacán, Mexico — The armored vehicle, or what now remained of it, lay abandoned in the road where a landmine had blown it up. The bodies of the vehicle’s occupants, cartel sicarios who had been killed as they tried to flee, were nowhere to be found when we examined the incinerated wreckage several days later. Neither, though, were most residents of the surrounding village, who had fled en masse to escape the same fate.

Nearly the entire population of El Guayabo, approximately 400 to 500 dirt-poor lime pickers living on communal land in the west Mexican state of Michoacán, fled hastily in mid-July to escape combat between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG, and the Caballeros Templarios. When I went before dawn on July 30 with local human rights defenders

See Full Page