Citizens demanding the removal of state police from their towns may have been paid by criminal gangs to stage a protest outside the State Government Palace in Guadalajara Wednesday.
“We have indications that some of the people who traveled into the city from various municipalities were offered 300 pesos,” Attorney General Eduardo Almaguer told reporters later in the day.
Nonetheless, Almaguer said the complaints of demonstrators alleging abuses by state police officers stationed in the towns would be investigated.
The 500 or so demonstrators arrived in ten trucks and came from municipalities predominantly in the south of Jalisco, as well as Ocotlan and other communities on the shores of Lake Chapala.
A spokesperson for the group said citizens were “fed up” with the abuses committed by officers from the Fuerza Unica, the elite, first-response until of police officers created less than two years ago. “They barge into your homes, steal your cell phones, use extortion, and harass you without cause,” he said.
Threatening to set up their own “self defense” force in retaliation, the protestors demanded the return of municipal police officers to their towns. Some local forces in Jalisco have been disbanded, or drastically cut back, after investigations revealed widespread collusion between regional law enforcement and the Jalisco Nuevo Generacion drug cartel.
Almaguer said he had listened to a tape recording in which people admitted being offered money to travel to Guadalajara and participate in the protest.