GUAJES DE AYALA, Mexico — Jesús Domínguez pushes through thick brush lining a rugged mountainside with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a grenade fastened to his leather belt.
He marches alongside a pack of camouflage-clad men patrolling the rural stretches of Mexico against one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels.
Armed with military-grade weapons smuggled from the U.S., the 50-man force is one of dozens of “autodefensa,” or “self-defense,” groups that have emerged over the past decade in Mexico to fight increasingly sophisticated cartels in areas far out of the reach of security forces.
“The government doesn’t care about us, and it’s impossible for our arms to compete with (the cartel’s),” said Domínguez, 34, from a watch post overlooking the mountains of Guerrero state. “They come at you with a ton of force, so you need to respond with force…If you don’t, they’ll overwhelm you.”
The vigilantes in Guajes de Ayala join a volatile landscape of warring armed groups – from cartels with tentacles across Latin America to local mafias – in regions like Guerrero ravaged by splintering cartels for decades. It’s a tangle Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum will have to unravel under pressure from the Trump administration and fears of more violence following the killing of Mexico’s most powerful drug lord.
The vigilante group was formed in 2020 when the cartel La Nueva Familia Michoacana tried to take control of seven communities buried deep in the mountains along a strategic throughway connecting cartels to the port city of Acapulco, where drugs and other illegal goods flow.
Residents said the cartel, designated a foreign terrorist organization last year by the Trump administration, started illegally logging in their lands and tried to force residents to join fights against rival gangs.
In the absence of Mexican military and police forces, locals armed themselves. Sporadic fire fights stretched on for nearly a year. Residents fled on foot, walking hours through far-off mountains with little more than the clothes on their backs. Communities of 1,600 people dwindled to just 400.
After a pause in the conflict, the vigilantes rearmed in October when the Nueva Familia Michoacana began to again push into their territory, setting up fentanyl labs and monitoring them with drones, said the group’s leader, Javier Hernández.
Now, the men guard their towns from mountain watch posts and surveil 100 cartel gunmen camped out a few miles (kilometers) away using their own drones.
“We don’t want to be part of their ranks and we don’t want to leave our lands,” Hernández said. “We don’t want to be slaves to any cartel.”
Conflict is more entrenched in Guerrero than in most Mexican states, with a history of militancy dating back to guerrilla movements in the 1960s. The landscape has grown increasingly complex as cartels have fractured into rival factions creating a much different situation than in the past when one cartel held monolithic control over a region. According to a 2025 DEA report, five cartels operate here. So do various local gangs and vigilante groups, many of which are allied with the larger cartels.
“You have a kaleidoscope of armed groups,” said Mónica Serrano, a professor at the Colegio de Mexico studying violence in Guerrero. “It’s one of the most vexing challenges facing the country and is at the root of the violence.”
Self-defense forces took off in Michoacan and Guerrero around 2013. Like the group in Guajes de Ayala, they were formed as a desperate attempt to avoid being caught in the crossfire of warring cartels.
But in places where criminal groups are more present than law enforcement, nearly every vigilante movement that has emerged in recent history has either been coopted by rival cartels or massacred. Mexico’s government has been split about whether it should talk to vigilantes or treat them as criminals.
In some cases, groups became cartel paramilitary forces themselves, flush with money and terrorizing the communities they claimed to protect. In others, cartels armed local citizens to help fight off rival gangs.
“They corner you and you can’t do anything,” Domínguez said. “That’s how what’s been created – which began as autonomy – is corrupted. People end up joining criminal groups just to survive.”
The Guajes de Ayala community said it remains independent, but forces wield equipment far beyond the means of local farmers, including drone detection systems and tapped radio frequencies, and DJI drones worth thousands of dollars to spy on cartel gunmen.
They carry AK-47s and AR-15s stamped with “MADE IN USA” and names of gun makers in Florida, South Carolina and even Poland. Because Mexico has strict gun control laws, the vast majority of arms in Mexico are smuggled from the U.S. by cartels.
One gunman confirmed the vigilantes purchase guns from cartels, but would not say from which group.
Another said he was once part of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, and was paid to join the vigilantes. Another wore a hat reading “El Señor de los Gallos,” a nickname for Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, the powerful CJNG leader slain by Mexico’s military in February.
Two local criminal gangs fighting with the Nueva Familia Michoacana allow Guajes de Ayala residents to transit their territories to not be closed in on all sides like in the past.
At the same time, Hernández said he feeds intelligence of the rival cartel to law enforcement, and that his group turned down alliance offers from other vigilante groups known for preying on civilians.
The proliferation of armed groups across Mexico is a test for Sheinbaum as she seeks to offset Trump administration threats of U.S. military intervention.
Under Sheinbaum, security forces have come down on criminal groups with a heavier hand than her predecessors. Homicides sharply dipped since she took office to the lowest levels in a decade, government figures show.
But Hernández said, for them, things are worse than before.
“It’s a lie. They say the government is doing wonders, but it’s nothing but propaganda,” he said.
The killing of Oseguera Cervantes, or “El Mencho” was a major blow to Mexico’s most powerful criminal enterprise. But experts and some in communities like Guajes de Ayala worry it could fuel more violence if other criminal groups make violent power grabs or if rival factions of CJNG war for control.
One Marine captain in Guerrero, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns, said his forces were “preparing for a possible reorganization of these groups.” He added Mexican forces haven’t abandoned communities like Guajes de Ayala, and respond to calls for help from rural areas.
The villages in Guajes de Ayala have become ghost towns filled with vacant homes of people too scared to return.
Marisela Mojica, Domínguez’s mother, sent six of her children and grandchildren away after her daughter was kidnapped by people claiming to be the Nueva Familia Michoacana.
“If they come to kill us all, I want one of us to still be alive,” she said.
Mojica said she hasn’t seen her family in six years or met two grandchildren born after the family fled. She doesn’t know if she ever will.
Teachers too scared to cross from one criminal group’s territory to another stopped coming to classes in October, leaving schools abandoned. Government medical clinics have shuttered.
Hernández counts the abandoned homes left in ruins as he and his gunmen drive out to patrol the rolling peaks and valleys enveloping them.
“These mountains are a place of silence,” he said. “You have no voice, and no one hears you.”
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