En 2011 y en este contexto, los habitantes del municipio indígena de Cherán se enfrentaron a una organización criminal responsable de secuestros, extorsiones y tala ilegal en su territorio comunal. Actualmente, México vive una situación de violencia generalizada debido a los conflictos entre los cárteles de droga, el Estado y las empresas de extracción de recur-sos que luchan por el control territorial y económico. The peace formation process involved the valorization of a collective and territorially rooted identity, the strengthening of security and justice practices based on the authority of assemblies, and an incipient interest in the construction of economic alternatives for the local population. Study of this conflict and the communal responses generated in the peace process reveals that the violence was founded on social inequality and was both cause and effect of the indigenous population's material and cultural dispossession. In 2011 and in this context, the inhabitants of the indigenous municipality of Cherán confronted the criminal organization responsible for kidnappings, extortion, and illegal logging in their communal territory. Mexico is currently subject to generalized violence due to conflicts between drug cartels, the state, and resource-extraction companies jostling for territorial and economic control. Para entender a estos grupos es necesario complementar los puntos de vista actuales sobre las diversas formas que toman, centrados en su legalidad o ilegalidad, con un énfasis en la relación entre ellos y la sociedad con sus actores dominantes.

El Estado tolera con incertidumbre el surgimiento de grupos de defensa armados en la región al tratar de someterlos a un modelo de participación ciudadana en asuntos de seguridad. Los diversos experimentos en defensa comunitaria de grupos organizados en Guerrero y Michoacán, México, para enfrentar la inseguridad producida por el crimen organizado ocurren en un entorno social, un área gris en la que la legalidad y la ilegalidad se difuminan en función de las reconfiguraciones económicas regionales que han fomentado la violencia.

Understanding these groups calls for supplementing current views about their various forms, which focus on their legality/ illegality, with an emphasis on the relationship between them and the society and its dominant actors. The state uneasily tolerates the emergence of armed defense groups in the region by attempting to subject them to the model of citizen participation in security matters. The various experiments in community defense of organized groups in Guerrero and Michoacán, Mexico, to confront the insecurity produced by organized crime are occurring in a social setting in which legality and illegality are blurred-a grey area-as a function of regional economic reconfigurations that have fostered violence.

Altavista by Fernando Calvi