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Nestora Salgado, who once ran a local community police force in
the opium-rich southwestern state of Guerrero, said she had
filed a lawsuit accusing ruling party presidential candidate
Jose Antonio Meade of defamation after he called her a
"kidnapper" in a televised debate.
The fight over whether Salgado is a heroic social activist or a
criminal has put a spotlight on wider differences between
presidential candidates over how to fix Mexico's law and order
problems, a major campaign theme ahead of the July 1 election.
Meade, third placed in polls, kept up pressure against his rival
and Salgado in a Tweet on Friday, writing that as president he
would follow the law without exception "while others opt for
amnesty and form alliances with criminals."
Lopez Obrador is exploring a plan for criminal amnesty to quell
the country's gang-related violence, on the heels of the
bloodiest year in a war against drug gangs that has tallied up
at least 200,000 homicides over the past decade.
The amnesty idea, along with his backing of Salgado and Jose
Manuel Mireles Valverde, a former vigilante leader in the
gang-terrorized state of Michoacan, is an attempt to secure
votes from indigenous and other marginalized groups drawn into
the drug war, said Javier Oliva Posada, a political science
professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Salgado, 46, helped found her local policing group after
witnessing the kidnapping and murder of a young taxi driver in
2012, part of the "autodefensa," or self-defense, movement that
grew a few years ago in towns with little trust in either armed
drug gangs or the police forces sent to fight them.
Salgado's group was considered legal under a Guerrero state law
allowing self-policing in certain cases.
In 2013, Salgado, a dual U.S.-Mexico citizen, was arrested after
the families of six teenage girls locally accused of dealing
drugs said her group had kidnapped and extorted them.
Salgado spent two years and seven months in prison but a federal
judge in 2016 acquitted her of all charges.
In a 2016 report, Mexico's National Human Rights Commission said
that Salgado's arrest violated her right to due process. But the
entity also recognized that 12 prisoners, including four minors,
in Salgado's town of Olinala had experienced human right
violations at the hands of community police groups.
Lopez Obrador has said Meade's attacks are a "dirty war."
"She is fighting for there to be peace and tranquility and was
accused in a despicable way," Lopez Obrador said at a campaign
rally in the central state of Jalisco this week.
Salgado has maintained her innocence.
"In the two years that I've been free, the campaign now
attacking me hasn't made a single sound," she said in a radio
interview on Thursday. "Now that I am a running candidate, they
want to make me wear the mask of a criminal."
(Reporting by Suman Naishadham; Editing by Daina Beth Solomon
and Joseph Radford)
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