21 ms·

Cheran: A town that threw out police, politicians and gangsters

123 points by kawera 10y ago

yumaikas 10y ago
I admire this community banding together to kick out the (rather corrupt, if I understand Mexico) police, politicians and gangsters. It would be nice if most Americans would self govern at the same level, be we seem to have too many differences to be able to pull that off outside of the stray small town.
phantom_oracle 10y ago
When reading stories like these, I sometimes wonder how happy these modified-subsistence-living folk are. They will likely never see most places beyond their small farming-community town, probably won't do air/train/ship travel and they probably will never see even $X00,000 in net-worth. But sometimes it seems that they are probably happier than the rest of us. Sitting in our cubicles, working 80 hours per week for 40-hour/week jobs, just to earn that little more money or get a slightly better job-title. While they enjoy the land, the openness and live directly next to nature, the rest of us just "consume". We eat, cohabit and slog away the valuable asset of time, just to repeat this cycle. We site behind keyboards, spending "10,000" hours mastering things that don't matter as much as the food we need from these kinds of people (who seem like farmers). We create pointless profiles and indulge in the gamification of these centralized ad-monsters, who steal our time through artificial "likes", "retweets", "upvotes", "stars", etc. Granted, these people are homogenous and can make a system like this work. I just hope that the poison of alcoholism doesn't ruin them and what they're attempting to do in a country that is somewhat ravaged by drugs/cartels (or pointed out to be by the centralized mass-media cartel).
- umanwizard 10y ago
  > working 80 hours per week Why would you do that, in America? (Assuming you're a software engineer or other white-collar job). Are you in game programming or something?
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > But sometimes it seems that they are probably happier than the rest of us. I remember one episode of Anthony Bourdain from years ago. He was in some South American country in a village and he went along to gather some yucca with a local farmer. Saying how great these people live in communion with nature and so on. And the farmer looks at him and says something to the effect of "you can have this, how about a trade". Meaning "you get to farm yucca and I go to live in your apartment in New York". Not sure what my point even is, but I think it is about choice. It is ok if they end up living and doing that by choice, but if they are forced by circumstance they might feel trapped. We can go and start farming and living like this (I would certainly fail there quickly). But if they want to, they can't come and sit in cubicles and get paid for it.
  - nickff 10y ago
    I think you are right, and that we should not romanticize poverty. Many people view a 'simple life' as being one of purity and virtue, but there are very good reasons for why so many poor farmers want to move to the city.
  - shitgoose 10y ago
    it is not about living in NYC vs Mexican jungle. it is about living in Mexican jungle with or without gangsters/politicians/police. who knows, maybe we should try that too.
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      Sorry, I did diverge from the topic at hand. I didn't respond directly to the article but rather, the GP's comment made me remember something from a show I saw a while ago. So I wasn't talking specifically about Cheran but rather about the idea of how it might be nice to live a simple life like they do, and that often the simple part might be not as simple.
      - shitgoose 10y ago
        - you are right, GP digressed first - our lives may not look that "sophisticated" to someone who travels to Monaco in private plane on a whim; all our "sophistication" is only in our heads - generally speaking, i was amazed how defensive most people in this thread became, when they faced the fact that somewhere really far away in Mexican jungle some people dared to chose to live without gangsters/police/politicians; people here are almost offended by that possibility and started coming up with poorly designed straw man arguments (like GP) just to take attention away from the subject
- nugget 10y ago
  Money is simply a means to an end. If you don't know what that end is, it's easy to feel restless, directionless and miserable. ''He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.''
- crdb 10y ago
  I worked for a few months in Maharashtra with an Indian FMCG/white goods manufacturer. We were trying to develop products for the "bottom of the pyramid" market - think families living in one room on $30-100 a month. Every youth in the villages was trying to get to the cities. Their parents often couldn't read or even speak Hindi (let alone English), only their local dialect. So the kids were the ones getting the information for parents (like the price of goods in shops), sometimes translating, etc. as they were the first generation to be able to do so. With a bit of schooling, they could get a factory or even a white collar job and happily left behind their subsistence living. I think the "happiness" part was summed up with an interview my team had with a local woman. More than half her family, husband and all siblings included, were dead, usually before the age of 30, from causes ranging from disease to snakes to crossing the road without hearing the car. Now I speak neither Hindi nor Marathi or whatever the local dialect was, and even connecting with and understanding my middle class Indian colleagues was difficult so maybe I saw what I wanted to see. Nevertheless I got the impression that the way people cope with such a harsh life is through a form of shell shock. They withdraw and just get on with surviving. I looked at the folks living next to their swimming pool sized field from which their entire life depended. I had a tough time seeing happiness. Nature, like the universe, is a cold and harsh place that doesn't care about you. The worst part is perhaps the lack of hope, of direction: tomorrow will always be like today, until the snake, disease or car gets you. At least the children have a bit of hope now, and through them the parents. I left with renewed appreciation for what we have. Even today, I remember the intense happiness from seeing the smooth, clean tarmac at LHR. It surprised me somewhat how Brits could be so grumpy when they have it so good... I'll leave the story about Tibetan yak farmers playing Android games whilst herding the beasts on horseback for another day.
- agnivade 10y ago
  > But sometimes it seems that they are probably happier than the rest of us. That's all that matters to me. True happiness. Do whatever gives you true happiness. If you are happy overworking yourself to get that promotion, that's totally fine. Or if you are happy working at a low paying cash counter job at a supermall, that is okay too. I think a major factor in this is not to get lost in the endless cycle of continuously trying to gratify yourself by siphoning off from what society offers you. This just leads you into a bottomless rabbit hole which forces you to be "unhappy" until you have that "new cool thing". I have quit my old job. Joined a couple of friends at a startup, doing consultancy work. Nothing fancy. But we get along just fine. Cut myself off from facebook. Work from home, work out, contribute to open source. Couldn't be happier than what I am now.
- lr 10y ago
  Just look at the Amish and Mennonites, and you will see people who are happy, subsist, and even prosper, by leading a life that requires little to no modern ameneties.
  - gaius 10y ago
    Not remotely comparable - an Amish need never worry about a warlord coming to steal his crops or his livestock or his daughters because the full might of the US govt protects his community.
    - mchaver 10y ago
      Actually there are Mennonite communities in Mexico and some are affected by the drug cartels, particularly around Nuevo Ideal, Durango.
- nradov 10y ago
  You have no idea what it's actually like. Go live in one of those places for a few months and then tell us how happy the people are.
  - shitgoose 10y ago
    Well, let them bring back police, gangsters and politicians. I am sure that will make things so much more fun.
    - shitgoose 10y ago
      I am glad that lot of people disagree. Let's NOT bring back police, gangsters and politicians.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- d0mine 10y ago
  You might like "Story of the Mexican Fisherman" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139090
- ekianjo 10y ago
  The happiness of the countryside folks is a recurring myth in History. You can even see if in Antiquity with the scribes class writing about how peasants have a simple and happy life. The truth is much more nuanced and living on the land is harsh and hard work. Only the ones who never experienced it have an idyllic vision of it.
- boards2x 10y ago
  Same goes to many parts of the USA. Many of these populations are probably Drumpf voters. Many never had a passport issue and believe the US is the "greatest nation on earth". Many don't speak a second language, not sure exactly where the countries their own country invaded are located, or even which people they've destroyed and exterminated when Europeans first invaded North America.
- jrochkind1 10y ago
  I wouldn't romantisize poverty, but the people in this story would be poor whether or not they had kicked out the gangs and politicians. They're certainly happier now that they have.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
> Every vehicle is stopped, its occupants questioned about where they have come from and where they are going. This is great and all, but it's not truly consistent with an American style of democracy which respects the rights of individuals to travel freely. It's easy to imagine what would happen to any US city/county/region which set up a check point with the sole purpose of asking those questions of every person who passed through it.
- eyelidlessness 10y ago
  Checkpoints are routine in the US, in quite a lot of places but particularly near (not just on) the border. Many of the latter racially profile, directing a lot more scrutiny at non-white travelers.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
  >This is great and all, but it's not truly consistent with an American style of democracy which respects the rights of individuals to travel freely. Its completely consistent. Ever hear of stop and frisk?
  - gruez 10y ago
    ...which was declared unconstitutional
    - FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
      Driving while black? or brown? DUI checkpoints? Or, if you're ever found to be carrying a large amount of currency, police will seize it. My point is that the right of an individual to travel freely isn't respected as you think it is, especially if you are a minority,
      - HillaryBriss 10y ago
        i was trying to make the point that a local government in the US could not restrict the freedom of movement the way that collection of people are doing in that region of Mexico. it would end up in court and be forced to cease such restrictions on travel. only the federal government could do a thing like that, and even it might face lawsuits for such a restriction. my comment got a lot of down votes, but i feel like either i'm missing something or the people who voted it down are missing something. yes, the federal government restricts movement. yes, there are DUI spot checks in cities from time to time. yes there is even racial profiling by local police forces (which is not constitutional). but all of those things differ from an all-encompassing restriction on the freedom to travel into a region by mandatory choke points on roads into that region. but people reacted quite strongly. what on earth am i missing here?
adrianratnapala 10y ago
This is all interesting food for thought. I can't say I am thrilled by what that town is doing, but I can imagine it is better than the status quo ante. It makes you wonder if the nation-state model of government has been extended into places where earlier, tribal models would have been less bad. And Mexico isn't even much of a failure. Here is the kind of thing that makes me quesy: Its ban on political parties, meanwhile, has been upheld by the courts, which have confirmed its right not to participate in local, state or federal elections. OK, I see why they have the ban. But it also to curtails the right of the individual citizens to vote. Should any collective really have that right in a democracy?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Steeeve 10y ago
> Political parties were banned - and still are - because they were deemed to have caused divisions between people. What an insightful thing to do.
- gaius 10y ago
  Indeed, the North Koreans are proof!
  - Steeeve 10y ago
    NK actually has 4 political parties and independants.
exabrial 10y ago
If they threw out lawyers and insurance companies, hell I'd move there :P
- jrochkind1 10y ago
  I doubt there are any lawyers or insurance companies in Cheran. I also doubt you'd want to live there. They did what they did out of a necessity most of us would rather not have.
code_sardaukar 10y ago
As a former "left-anarchist" I'm familiar with this sort of story. We had similar stories of left-anarchist utopias from (1) pirates (2) partisans in the Spanish civil war and (3) various "workers collectives" throughout history. None of them lasted and most collapsed due to internal problems not being crushed by the nation state. What has been shown to work in the long run, is Western democracy.
- cel1ne 10y ago
  Thanks for the comment, I had exactly the same thought.
- drieddust 10y ago
  In few years time, we will read about Cheran mafia's ascend to power. These utopian dreams almost always result in oppressed becoming oppressors. This quote sums it up quite nicely. “But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.” ― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  - redial 10y ago
    Western democracy is the result of the French and American Revolutions.
    - eru 10y ago
      The US is not that important. Arguably the British tradition had a bigger impact---without people's revolutions. (There was the Glorious Revolution..)
      - redial 10y ago
        I'm sorry I don't understand your comment. Not that important for what? The British tradition (which tradition?) had a bigger impact on what? And all I'm saying is that at some point we get bored of calling successful revolutions, well, revolutions, and just accept them as the new normal. But we remember the short lived ones as revolutions because we never got around to give them another name, and thus we associate revolution with failure, when it is not the case at all (one way or the other).
dharma1 10y ago
Reminds me of the autodefensas, as depicted in the excellent documentary Cartel Land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel_Land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel_Land
finid 10y ago
"It makes me want to cry remembering that day," says Margarita. "It was like a horror movie - but it was the best thing we could have done." Just reading the article almost brought me to tears, too.
mkstowegnv 10y ago
Commenters who are framing this story in left/right/utopian politics are missing the point and not letting the brutality of the situation sink in enough to suppress their need to grind philosophical axes. It is a shame that apparently no Mexican HN visitors have come by to set them straight or perhaps they turned away in disgust at all the blather. I am just an ignorant gringo who has been briefly to Michoacan and heard talks by Cheran villagers at a conference, but anyone can see that these are heroic apolitical indigenous people who have invented a functioning government on the fly and under fire. One aspect that I have not seen mentioned outside of the talks I heard (and I am sorry that I could not quickly find a reference) is that early on they realized that choosing corruptible leaders would be fatal, and they came up with an unusual rule requiring that leaders be godparents - (a double filter as it requires unusual trustworthiness to be asked to raise children in the event of parental death and unusual generosity to accept.)

123 points by kawera 10y ago

I admire this community banding together to kick out the (rather corrupt, if I understand Mexico) police, politicians and gangsters. It would be nice if most Americans would self govern at the same level, be we seem to have too many differences to be able to pull that off outside of the stray small town.

phantom_oracle 10y ago

When reading stories like these, I sometimes wonder how happy these modified-subsistence-living folk are. They will likely never see most places beyond their small farming-community town, probably won't do air/train/ship travel and they probably will never see even $X00,000 in net-worth. But sometimes it seems that they are probably happier than the rest of us. Sitting in our cubicles, working 80 hours per week for 40-hour/week jobs, just to earn that little more money or get a slightly better job-title. While they enjoy the land, the openness and live directly next to nature, the rest of us just "consume". We eat, cohabit and slog away the valuable asset of time, just to repeat this cycle. We site behind keyboards, spending "10,000" hours mastering things that don't matter as much as the food we need from these kinds of people (who seem like farmers). We create pointless profiles and indulge in the gamification of these centralized ad-monsters, who steal our time through artificial "likes", "retweets", "upvotes", "stars", etc. Granted, these people are homogenous and can make a system like this work. I just hope that the poison of alcoholism doesn't ruin them and what they're attempting to do in a country that is somewhat ravaged by drugs/cartels (or pointed out to be by the centralized mass-media cartel).

umanwizard 10y ago
> working 80 hours per week Why would you do that, in America? (Assuming you're a software engineer or other white-collar job). Are you in game programming or something?
rdtsc 10y ago
> But sometimes it seems that they are probably happier than the rest of us. I remember one episode of Anthony Bourdain from years ago. He was in some South American country in a village and he went along to gather some yucca with a local farmer. Saying how great these people live in communion with nature and so on. And the farmer looks at him and says something to the effect of "you can have this, how about a trade". Meaning "you get to farm yucca and I go to live in your apartment in New York". Not sure what my point even is, but I think it is about choice. It is ok if they end up living and doing that by choice, but if they are forced by circumstance they might feel trapped. We can go and start farming and living like this (I would certainly fail there quickly). But if they want to, they can't come and sit in cubicles and get paid for it.
- nickff 10y ago
  I think you are right, and that we should not romanticize poverty. Many people view a 'simple life' as being one of purity and virtue, but there are very good reasons for why so many poor farmers want to move to the city.
- shitgoose 10y ago
  it is not about living in NYC vs Mexican jungle. it is about living in Mexican jungle with or without gangsters/politicians/police. who knows, maybe we should try that too.
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    Sorry, I did diverge from the topic at hand. I didn't respond directly to the article but rather, the GP's comment made me remember something from a show I saw a while ago. So I wasn't talking specifically about Cheran but rather about the idea of how it might be nice to live a simple life like they do, and that often the simple part might be not as simple.
    - shitgoose 10y ago
      - you are right, GP digressed first - our lives may not look that "sophisticated" to someone who travels to Monaco in private plane on a whim; all our "sophistication" is only in our heads - generally speaking, i was amazed how defensive most people in this thread became, when they faced the fact that somewhere really far away in Mexican jungle some people dared to chose to live without gangsters/police/politicians; people here are almost offended by that possibility and started coming up with poorly designed straw man arguments (like GP) just to take attention away from the subject
nugget 10y ago
Money is simply a means to an end. If you don't know what that end is, it's easy to feel restless, directionless and miserable. ''He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.''
crdb 10y ago
I worked for a few months in Maharashtra with an Indian FMCG/white goods manufacturer. We were trying to develop products for the "bottom of the pyramid" market - think families living in one room on $30-100 a month. Every youth in the villages was trying to get to the cities. Their parents often couldn't read or even speak Hindi (let alone English), only their local dialect. So the kids were the ones getting the information for parents (like the price of goods in shops), sometimes translating, etc. as they were the first generation to be able to do so. With a bit of schooling, they could get a factory or even a white collar job and happily left behind their subsistence living. I think the "happiness" part was summed up with an interview my team had with a local woman. More than half her family, husband and all siblings included, were dead, usually before the age of 30, from causes ranging from disease to snakes to crossing the road without hearing the car. Now I speak neither Hindi nor Marathi or whatever the local dialect was, and even connecting with and understanding my middle class Indian colleagues was difficult so maybe I saw what I wanted to see. Nevertheless I got the impression that the way people cope with such a harsh life is through a form of shell shock. They withdraw and just get on with surviving. I looked at the folks living next to their swimming pool sized field from which their entire life depended. I had a tough time seeing happiness. Nature, like the universe, is a cold and harsh place that doesn't care about you. The worst part is perhaps the lack of hope, of direction: tomorrow will always be like today, until the snake, disease or car gets you. At least the children have a bit of hope now, and through them the parents. I left with renewed appreciation for what we have. Even today, I remember the intense happiness from seeing the smooth, clean tarmac at LHR. It surprised me somewhat how Brits could be so grumpy when they have it so good... I'll leave the story about Tibetan yak farmers playing Android games whilst herding the beasts on horseback for another day.
agnivade 10y ago
> But sometimes it seems that they are probably happier than the rest of us. That's all that matters to me. True happiness. Do whatever gives you true happiness. If you are happy overworking yourself to get that promotion, that's totally fine. Or if you are happy working at a low paying cash counter job at a supermall, that is okay too. I think a major factor in this is not to get lost in the endless cycle of continuously trying to gratify yourself by siphoning off from what society offers you. This just leads you into a bottomless rabbit hole which forces you to be "unhappy" until you have that "new cool thing". I have quit my old job. Joined a couple of friends at a startup, doing consultancy work. Nothing fancy. But we get along just fine. Cut myself off from facebook. Work from home, work out, contribute to open source. Couldn't be happier than what I am now.
lr 10y ago
Just look at the Amish and Mennonites, and you will see people who are happy, subsist, and even prosper, by leading a life that requires little to no modern ameneties.
- gaius 10y ago
  Not remotely comparable - an Amish need never worry about a warlord coming to steal his crops or his livestock or his daughters because the full might of the US govt protects his community.
  - mchaver 10y ago
    Actually there are Mennonite communities in Mexico and some are affected by the drug cartels, particularly around Nuevo Ideal, Durango.
nradov 10y ago
You have no idea what it's actually like. Go live in one of those places for a few months and then tell us how happy the people are.
- shitgoose 10y ago
  Well, let them bring back police, gangsters and politicians. I am sure that will make things so much more fun.
  - shitgoose 10y ago
    I am glad that lot of people disagree. Let's NOT bring back police, gangsters and politicians.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
d0mine 10y ago
You might like "Story of the Mexican Fisherman" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139090
ekianjo 10y ago
The happiness of the countryside folks is a recurring myth in History. You can even see if in Antiquity with the scribes class writing about how peasants have a simple and happy life. The truth is much more nuanced and living on the land is harsh and hard work. Only the ones who never experienced it have an idyllic vision of it.
boards2x 10y ago
Same goes to many parts of the USA. Many of these populations are probably Drumpf voters. Many never had a passport issue and believe the US is the "greatest nation on earth". Many don't speak a second language, not sure exactly where the countries their own country invaded are located, or even which people they've destroyed and exterminated when Europeans first invaded North America.
jrochkind1 10y ago
I wouldn't romantisize poverty, but the people in this story would be poor whether or not they had kicked out the gangs and politicians. They're certainly happier now that they have.

HillaryBriss 10y ago

> Every vehicle is stopped, its occupants questioned about where they have come from and where they are going. This is great and all, but it's not truly consistent with an American style of democracy which respects the rights of individuals to travel freely. It's easy to imagine what would happen to any US city/county/region which set up a check point with the sole purpose of asking those questions of every person who passed through it.

eyelidlessness 10y ago
Checkpoints are routine in the US, in quite a lot of places but particularly near (not just on) the border. Many of the latter racially profile, directing a lot more scrutiny at non-white travelers.
FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
>This is great and all, but it's not truly consistent with an American style of democracy which respects the rights of individuals to travel freely. Its completely consistent. Ever hear of stop and frisk?
- gruez 10y ago
  ...which was declared unconstitutional
  - FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
    Driving while black? or brown? DUI checkpoints? Or, if you're ever found to be carrying a large amount of currency, police will seize it. My point is that the right of an individual to travel freely isn't respected as you think it is, especially if you are a minority,
    - HillaryBriss 10y ago
      i was trying to make the point that a local government in the US could not restrict the freedom of movement the way that collection of people are doing in that region of Mexico. it would end up in court and be forced to cease such restrictions on travel. only the federal government could do a thing like that, and even it might face lawsuits for such a restriction. my comment got a lot of down votes, but i feel like either i'm missing something or the people who voted it down are missing something. yes, the federal government restricts movement. yes, there are DUI spot checks in cities from time to time. yes there is even racial profiling by local police forces (which is not constitutional). but all of those things differ from an all-encompassing restriction on the freedom to travel into a region by mandatory choke points on roads into that region. but people reacted quite strongly. what on earth am i missing here?

adrianratnapala 10y ago

This is all interesting food for thought. I can't say I am thrilled by what that town is doing, but I can imagine it is better than the status quo ante. It makes you wonder if the nation-state model of government has been extended into places where earlier, tribal models would have been less bad. And Mexico isn't even much of a failure. Here is the kind of thing that makes me quesy: Its ban on political parties, meanwhile, has been upheld by the courts, which have confirmed its right not to participate in local, state or federal elections. OK, I see why they have the ban. But it also to curtails the right of the individual citizens to vote. Should any collective really have that right in a democracy?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Steeeve 10y ago

> Political parties were banned - and still are - because they were deemed to have caused divisions between people. What an insightful thing to do.

gaius 10y ago
Indeed, the North Koreans are proof!
- Steeeve 10y ago
  NK actually has 4 political parties and independants.

exabrial 10y ago

If they threw out lawyers and insurance companies, hell I'd move there :P

jrochkind1 10y ago
I doubt there are any lawyers or insurance companies in Cheran. I also doubt you'd want to live there. They did what they did out of a necessity most of us would rather not have.

code_sardaukar 10y ago

As a former "left-anarchist" I'm familiar with this sort of story. We had similar stories of left-anarchist utopias from (1) pirates (2) partisans in the Spanish civil war and (3) various "workers collectives" throughout history. None of them lasted and most collapsed due to internal problems not being crushed by the nation state. What has been shown to work in the long run, is Western democracy.

cel1ne 10y ago
Thanks for the comment, I had exactly the same thought.
drieddust 10y ago
In few years time, we will read about Cheran mafia's ascend to power. These utopian dreams almost always result in oppressed becoming oppressors. This quote sums it up quite nicely. “But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.” ― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
- redial 10y ago
  Western democracy is the result of the French and American Revolutions.
  - eru 10y ago
    The US is not that important. Arguably the British tradition had a bigger impact---without people's revolutions. (There was the Glorious Revolution..)
    - redial 10y ago
      I'm sorry I don't understand your comment. Not that important for what? The British tradition (which tradition?) had a bigger impact on what? And all I'm saying is that at some point we get bored of calling successful revolutions, well, revolutions, and just accept them as the new normal. But we remember the short lived ones as revolutions because we never got around to give them another name, and thus we associate revolution with failure, when it is not the case at all (one way or the other).

dharma1 10y ago

Reminds me of the autodefensas, as depicted in the excellent documentary Cartel Land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel_Land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel_Land

finid 10y ago

"It makes me want to cry remembering that day," says Margarita. "It was like a horror movie - but it was the best thing we could have done." Just reading the article almost brought me to tears, too.

mkstowegnv 10y ago

Commenters who are framing this story in left/right/utopian politics are missing the point and not letting the brutality of the situation sink in enough to suppress their need to grind philosophical axes. It is a shame that apparently no Mexican HN visitors have come by to set them straight or perhaps they turned away in disgust at all the blather. I am just an ignorant gringo who has been briefly to Michoacan and heard talks by Cheran villagers at a conference, but anyone can see that these are heroic apolitical indigenous people who have invented a functioning government on the fly and under fire. One aspect that I have not seen mentioned outside of the talks I heard (and I am sorry that I could not quickly find a reference) is that early on they realized that choosing corruptible leaders would be fatal, and they came up with an unusual rule requiring that leaders be godparents - (a double filter as it requires unusual trustworthiness to be asked to raise children in the event of parental death and unusual generosity to accept.)