MEXICO. Cochoapa el Grande, Guererro. 2024. Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday where family members gather to remember their deceased loved ones. It is a day to pay respect, to celebrate life, not mourn death, and to welcome back their spirits in a violent and poor province where most towns are run by drug cartels. Cochoapa, with its Misteco Indian population of 18,000, is the poorest municipality in all of Mexico. © Larry Towell

Auto Defensas – Mexican Cartels

Larry Towell

2024 — Guerrero, Mexico

About this series

In 2024, Larry Towell travelled to Guererro, one of the poorest and most violent provinces in Mexico where villages are under the control of organized crime. Of the estimated 200 cartels and sub-groups now operating in Mexico, sixteen are in Guererro, including Los Ardillos (The Squirrels), which controls the region around Ayahualtempa where local poppy production for opium has been replaced by fentanyl.
“In 2015, the cartels started coming,” said Luis Morales Rojas, a local town leader. “In 2016, they became more visible. In 2017, they visited and offered me a bag of money. I told them we will give them nothing. They said they would kill me and my whole family…. We either had to join them, or resist them.”
Villages that organize self-defense units (auto defensas) and fight organized crime live under constant intimidation. This small Nahua community of 686 persons, where 70% of the population speaks an indigenous language, has no hotels, restaurants, grocery stores nor gas stations. Since there is no high school, children cannot attend beyond primary education. Leaving town would endanger their lives, including entering Hueicantenango, which physically touches Ayalhualtempa’s perimeter. In May 2024, 60-year-old Rayes Bolando Domingo was shot dead near his cattle at the town’s edge.
Local residents have been be kidnapped, tortured and mutilated. On January 2, three local members, plus one civilian woman, disappeared. All four were found decapitated. A year ago, Pablo Morales, brother on one auto defensa member was taken and later found mutilated. Thirty-five villagers from Ayahualtempa have been murdered since 2015.
All men must serve in the auto defense units for a year, rotating on 12 hour shifts with .22 caliber rifles and 16, 20 and .410 gauge single shot shotguns. When asked how they were able to resist cartel machine guns with such small firearms, Luis said “We’re good shots. The cartels with their machine guns make a lot of noise, shoot wildly, and miss their targets….”

MEXICO. Ayahualtempa, Guererro. 2024. Aerial. Members of Guererro’s auto defensas (self-defence units), armed with only .22 calibre rifles and 20, 16, and .410 gauge shotguns against drug cartel machineguns. It is unsafe for any person, most of whom are indigenous Nahua, to leave town. Thirty-five persons have been killed since 2015. Very few of Guererro’s 81 municipalities have remained resistant and organized. Some members, understandably, chose not to be photographed. Others chose to be. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Ayahualtempa, Guererro. 2024. Members of Guererro’s auto defensas (self-defence units), armed with only .22 calibre rifles and 20, 16, and .410 gauge shotguns against drug cartel machineguns. It is unsafe for any person, most of whom are indigenous Nahua, to leave town. Thirty-five persons have been killed since 2015. Very few of Guererro’s 81 municipalities have remained resistant and organized. Some members, understandably, chose not to be photographed. Others chose to be. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Cochoapa el Grande, Guererro. 2024. Cemetery. Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday where family members gather to remember their deceased loved ones. It is a day to pay respect, to celebrate life, not mourn death, and to welcome back their spirits in a violent and poor province where most towns are run by drug cartels. Cochoapa, with its Misteco Indian population of 18,000, is the poorest municipality in all of Mexico. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Ayahualtempa, Guererro. 2024. Commandante Luis Morales Rojas. Members of Guererro’s auto defensas (self-defence units), armed with only .22 calibre rifles and 20, 16, and .410 gauge shotguns against drug cartel machineguns. It is unsafe for any person, most of whom are indigenous Nahua, to leave town. Thirty-five persons have been killed since 2015. Very few of Guererro’s 81 municipalities have remained resistant and organized. Some members, understandably, chose not to be photographed. Others chose to be. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Cochoapa el Grande, Guererro. 2024. Policeman in cemetery. Cochoapa el Grande, Guererro, Mexico Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday where family members gather to remember their deceased loved ones. It is a day to pay respect, to celebrate life, not mourn death, and to welcome back their spirits in a violent and poor province where most towns are run by drug cartels. Cochoapa, with its Misteco Indian population of 18,000, is the poorest municipality in all of Mexico. © LarryTowell
MEXICO. Cochoapa el Grande, Guererro. 2024. Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday where family members gather to remember their deceased loved ones. It is a day to pay respect, to celebrate life, not mourn death, and to welcome back their spirits in a violent and poor province where most towns are run by drug cartels. Cochoapa, with its Misteco Indian population of 18,000, is the poorest municipality in all of Mexico. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Santa Cruz del Rincon, Guererro. 2024. Home of auto defensas Commandante Julienne. Santa Cruz del Rincon was the first village in Guererro to organize auto defensas in 1995. It is the oldest and most important of the self-defence units consisting of indigenous Mephaa. The village of over 6000 has a revolutionary history with leftist leaders including Lucio Cabanas who founded the Party of the Poor in 1967 which eventually became a guerilla organization and General Gerardo Vasquez who was an important guerilla leader and union organizer in the 1960’s and 1970’s. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Ayahualtempa, Guererro. 2024. Entering village of Ayahualempa. Members of Guererro’s auto defensas (self-defence units), armed with only .22 calibre rifles and 20, 16, and .410 gauge shotguns against drug cartel machineguns. It is unsafe for any person, most of whom are indigenous Nahua, to leave town. Thirty-five persons have been killed since 2015. Very few of Guererro’s eighty-one municipalities have remained resistant and organized. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Ayahualtempa, Guererro. 2024. Evangelical church service in a community with an organized self-defence unit (auto defensa) against drug cartel control of the town. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Cochoapa el Grande, Guererro. 2024. Food Market. Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday where family members gather to remember their deceased loved ones. It is a day to pay respect, to celebrate life, not mourn death, and to welcome back their spirits in a violent and poor province where most towns are run by drug cartels. Cochoapa, with its Misteco Indian population of 18,000, is the poorest municipality in all of Mexico. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Ayahualtempa, Guererro. 2024. Members of Guererro’s auto defensas (self-defence units), armed with only .22 calibre rifles and 20, 16, and .410 gauge shotguns against drug cartel machineguns. It is unsafe for any person, most of whom are indigenous Nahua, to leave town. Thirty-five persons have been killed since 2015. Very few of Guererro’s 81 municipalities have remained resistant and organized. Some members, understandably, chose not to be photographed. Others chose to be. © Larry Towell
MEXICO. Cochoapa el Grande, Guererro. 2024. Cemetery. Bird sacrifice on gravestone. Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday where family members gather to remember their deceased loved ones. It is a day to pay respect, to celebrate life, not mourn death, and to welcome back their spirits in a violent and poor province where most towns are run by drug cartels. Cochoapa, with its Misteco Indian population of 18,000, is the poorest municipality in all of Mexico. © Larry Towell

Photographer: Larry Towell
Nationality: Canadian
Based in: Ontario, Canada
Website:  www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/larry-towell
Instagram: @larrysgeneralstore


Larry Towell was born in rural Ontario in 1953. After studying visual arts at York University in Toronto from 1972 to 1976 and a stint of volunteer work in Calcutta, he lived in solitude on a homemade raft for two years in order to write.
In the 1980s, Towell taught folk music at night school and simultaneously documented the Nicaraguan Contra war and the relatives of the disappeared in Guatemala, which resulted in two oral histories and a book of poems. He joined Magnum in 1988 and became a freelance photographer.
In 1996, he completed a 10-year reportage on the war in El Salvador, which was followed by two books on the Palestinians. The World from My Front Porch, a project on his family and his philosophy on land and landlessness, was published in 2008, followed by a 10-year project documenting Mennonite migrant workers in Mexico and Canada. The Mennonites, published in 2000 by Phaidon, won many accolades and was re-released by GOST in 2022. His highly original book Afghanistan, a moving and in-depth look at a country crippled by conflict for decades, was published by Aperture in 2014.
Towell’s coverage of historical events, human rights and conflict, complemented by personal projects, has appeared in many leading publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Life magazine, Rolling Stone, Geo, Stern, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and has resulted in 16 books plus several music projects and films.
Honors include World Press Photo of the Year, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the inaugural Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the W. Eugene Smith Award and the Prix Nadar, among others. In 2020, Towell was named a Guggenheim Fellow.
He is also a gifted musician and songwriter, whose recordings include The Man I Left Behind, a set of three vinyl LPs of original ballads that focus on photography and the international issues he has documented. The collection was released in 2023, along with a feature-length documentary of the same name. That same year, The History War, a book documenting the situation in Ukraine, was published by GOST.
Towell has had numerous international exhibitions throughout his career, and his work is held in collections that include the Getty Center, National Gallery of Canada, George Eastman Museum, National Museum of Qatar, and Archive of Modern Conflict in the UK.