ABSTRACT
Although begun several years earlier, La Familia Michoacana - or La Familia - held its coming out party on September 6, 2006, when ruffians crashed into the seedy Sol y Sombra nightclub in Uruapan, Michoacán, and fired shots into the air. Although La Familia became archenemies of Los Zetas in 2006, they adopted many of the ex-Special Forces’ brutal techniques in seeking to oust Los Zetas from the state. In contrast to Los Zetas and other Mexican capos, La Familia’s leaders - especially the Bible-pounding El Más Loco - asserted that they were religiously motivated. They claimed to administer “divine justice” to rapists, robbers, corrupters of youth, and others whom the syndicate deems undesirable. At the outset, recruits must clean up their lives by throwing off any drug- or alcohol addiction. Before his April 2009 arrest at a baptism, Rafael “El Cede” Cedeño Hernández, a self-described pastor and permanent observer of the state’s human rights commission, took charge of indoctrination.
