Mexico may soon free vigilante movement founder

Mexican authorities may soon release a founder of the vigilante movement who fought against a powerful drug cartel in the western state of Michoacan until he was jailed last year. The attorney general's office said Friday it was dropping its opposition to a petition to free Jose Manuel Mireles, though an official said prosecutors were not dropping the drugs and weapons charges against the controversial doctor. His sister, Virginia Mireles Valverde, told AFP after meeting Attorney General Arely Gomez Gonzalez that the physician and several of his jailed followers "could be free in the next 72 hours." "My brother and his followers will have their freedom and this will end the abuse committed against citizens who organized themselves to defend their rights and property, which the authorities were unable to do," she said. The tall, mustachioed Mireles, who became the most famous figure of Michoacan's vigilante movement, was arrested in June 2014 shortly after his armed group entered a town, despite a pact that the vigilantes made with the government to disarm. His arrest came a month after the government folded the vigilante movement into an officially sanctioned "rural defense" force, a move that Mireles opposed. Mireles and local farmers founded vigilante militias in 2013 to fight off the cult-like Knights Templar drug cartel. The gang's leaders have all been detained by the authorities, severely weakening a cartel that had terrorized the state for years through murder, kidnapping and extortion. But violence persists in Michoacan. On Friday, horrified motorists spotted two bodies hanging from a highway bridge. In a separate incident, two gunmen and a police officer were killed in a shootout in the town of Zamora.