The squirrel men

Dear friends,

Perhaps, some say, it was the murder of his young son that sent Don Celso's bloodlust stratospheric.

Himself the son of 'La Ardilla' - 'The Squirrel', Celso was already born and raised in war. His ex-policeman father founded the armed criminal organisation now known as Los Ardillos, which, through pacts with state and municipal government forces, controls certain swathes of territory in the state of Guerrero. Changing the noun from the feminine 'ardilla' to the masculine 'ardillo' was a hypermasculine move, perhaps - as if terrorising communities from the mountains to the city wasn't already enough and Celso demanded to exceed even the macho binaries of Mexican Spanish. (How the diminutive and dainty squirrel itself got coded masculine here may remain some kind of narcosemiotic mystery).

I would hear about this group in my first years reporting in Guerrero. "Los Ardillos", it was whispered, when I asked who it was that invaded Tlaltempanapa in Zitlala municipality and displaced at least 70 Nahua Indigenous people, who walked for several days through inhospitable foliage, living off river water and old tortillas before finding relative safety closer to Chilpancingo.

Six years later, in asking why slain mayor Alejandro Arcos lost his life, the answer is resigned: "Los Ardillos want to control everything".