[ilbegone]

Mexico's drug battle, pg. 2

And he said he was talking to Israeli firms about purchasing top-of-the line surveillance and security equipment.

"The important thing is to have the information," he said. "How did we come by the information? Doesn't matter to me. . . . Just bring me the information."

He said that those who worried that the squads would run amok could relax because they would be under his control.

"It is not within the law, but it's not against the law either," he said.

Consuelo Morales, a nun who stands not quite 5 feet tall, was one of the people condemning Fernandez. No one wanted to hear her.

Not unusual, she says.

"Citizens are sick and tired of corruption and impunity and tempted to take justice into their own hands," she said. "But if we permit citizens to form groups to settle scores, because the authorities don't function at any level, then you create a monster."

As head of a human rights organization, Morales for years has been trying to shine light on the misdeeds of officials, police and others, with little success.

On her laptop computer, the nun stores videos of vicious beatings of suspects in jails. In one, a young man sinks to the floor yelping and writhing in pain as uniformed police officers pummel him with a long, flat board.

The video was aired on television. The reaction? Zilch, Morales said. "If this doesn't mobilize people, then I hate to say we are paralyzed."

In Catholic countries torn by strife, the church has often served as a catalyst for change. But in Mexico, the Roman Catholic Church has failed in that mission, top clerics say.

Much like the broader society, the church is caught between fear and complicity, between the impulse to take a stand and the desire to avoid conflict.

"The church has been content to follow its same rhythm of always, when it should be revving its engines," said Hector Gonzalez Martinez, archbishop of the tense, rough state of Durango.

Gonzalez made a splash this year when he said that Mexico's top fugitive drug lord, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, was living in a Durango mountain village and that "everyone knows" it, including authorities who had failed to capture him.

Four days later, two army officers were found slain in the area the cleric had singled out, with a sign attached to their bodies: "Neither officials nor priests will ever be able to handle El Chapo."

This year, a priest and two seminary students were killed in the state of Guerrero, presumably by traffickers; in Durango, a region where gunmen "own the night" in village after village, "every priest has been threatened," Gonzalez says.

Gonzalez continued to visit remote parishes up and down the Sierra Madre foothills that march through western and northern Durango.

Until August.

A village mayor ran to the visiting Gonzalez to report that gunmen in several SUVs were gathering nearby. Then Gonzalez's cellphone rang. A state official in the Durango capital said U.S. drug agents had learned of a plot to kill the archbishop.

The official dispatched a helicopter to whisk him to safety.