The lime farmer turned vigilante rebel's premonition was proved right on a recent afternoon, when he was killed in a blizzard of nearly 1,000 bullets in one of Mexico's most violence-stricken states.
Hours after Mora's incinerated truck was towed from the crime scene, the 67-year-old's trademark hat was placed on his coffin at a wake most people were too afraid to attend. "We want justice. This cannot go unpunished," said his brother, Guadalupe Mora.
The murder of Mora - whose campaign against the cartels made him a national celebrity - has put the spotlight back on Mexico's brutal conflict, which claimed more than 30,000 lives last year.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won power in 2018 vowing to "pacify" his country with a dramatic, socially focused change in security policy he called "abrazos no balazos" - "hugs not bullets".
"In three years' time there will be no more war," he told voters on the campaign trail. But as his six-year term draws to a close and would-be successors jostle for position before next June's presidential election with Panglossian promises of their own, there is scant sign of peace.
Barely a day goes by without reports of bloodshed and ultraviolence in one of Mexico's 31 states: a newspaper correspondent killed in Nayarit, eight call centre workers dismembered and six people killed in an IED attack on the police in Jalisco, a car bomb in Guanajuato, or the besieging of the state capital of Guerrero by thousands of protesters after two alleged gangsters were detained.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 17, 2023-Ausgabe von The Guardian.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 17, 2023-Ausgabe von The Guardian.
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