Cartel Crusaders

As far as cartels go, the Knights Templar Cartel has to be the most unique. They are drug traffickers who are willing to execute their members for recreational use, murderers who protect communities, robbers who help the poor, and criminals with a strict moral code. They view themselves as a modern knightly order, which commits the worst crimes imaginable.

Holy Drug-Traffickers

The actual Knights Templar was a Catholic order of warriors; they fought in the Crusades, as well as conflicts in Europe. They have been romanticized over the last thousand years, and have been depicted in all kinds of media, ultimately inspiring this cartel to adopt their name and sigils. The Knights Templar Cartel, inspired by chivalric stories and Catholic fervor, attempted to imitate their namesake in several interesting ways. During initiations, recruits would reportedly be knighted with a sword, while members in attendance would be wearing armor and helmets. Most interestingly, the Knights had their codebook, which would be given to each member. The Associated Press managed to get a hold of one after members were arrested and their codebook was confiscated. In it there are many rules all members must follow:

• “The members of the Order must fight against materialism, injustice, and tyranny in the world.”
• “The Knights Templar will begin a challenging ideological battle to defend the values of a society based on ethics.”
• “I swear and promise to always seek to protect the oppressed, the widow, and the orphan.”
  “A Temple soldier cannot be enslaved by sectarian beliefs or narrow-minded opinions … a Templar must always seek the truth because God is in the truth.”
• “The Order promotes patriotism, and the expression of pride in one’s land.”
• “The Knights of the Order must conduct themselves with humility and be the most honorable, the most noble, the most courteous, the most honest, and the most chivalrous.”
• “That Knight who betrays the Templars will be punished with death, and all his properties will be confiscated; his family will suffer the same fate.”
• “It is prohibited to abuse the innocence of chaste women, and minors, using power or trickery to seduce them.”
• “For the use of deadly force, the council’s authorization is required.”
• “When a Knight … breaks the vow of silence of the Knights Templar of the state of Michoacan, he will receive a death sentence.”

Other than the punishment by death of a member and their family, many of these seem noble at the very least. It is difficult to believe that the cartel was against materialism and injustice while they were prolific drug traffickers, but who am I to judge?

The Religious Paragon

From December 2010 till its end in 2017, the Knights Templar operated out of Michoacan and was one of the most prominent cartels in Mexico. Its leader was Servando Gómez Martínez, also known as La Tuta, “The Teacher”. He is a fascinating character, referring to beheading-style executions as “Divine Justice,” and earning an impressive bounty of five million dollars. He was arrested in 2015 after police tracked a chocolate cake his girlfriend ordered him for his forty-ninth birthday. He had been hiding out in a cave, which was being used as a secret storehouse for the cartel, the Mexican Federal Police managed to capture him without firing a shot. He has remained in a maximum security prison for the last ten years, but it took two years after his arrest for the rest of the cartel to dissolve. I find it fitting that such a unique man was arrested in such a unique way.

To strengthen their position in Michoacán and expand outside of their territory, the Knights Templar first forged alliances with other cartels. They had a history of working with the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the nation’s most potent drug trafficking groups. Since both organizations aimed to dominate drug trafficking markets and routes, their alliance was founded on shared interests. However, the Knights Templar faced several formidable opponents, chief among them being the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). Established in 2009, the CJNG was a relatively new cartel that had rapidly grown to control vast regions of Mexico. They fought brutally, and the Templars found themselves outmatched by the better organized and equipped New Wave gangsters. The CJNG’s aggressive expansion limited the Templar’s influence in much of Mexico, and made it very difficult for them to have a larger role on the national level.

Additionally, the Knights Templar had a rocky relationship with local self-defense forces and vigilante groups. Ordinary people established militias to defend their communities and oppose the cartel’s violent rule. Locals tried to regain their safety and independence, which frequently resulted in conflicts between these groups and the Knights Templar. The Knights Templar made an effort to present themselves as community defenders despite their well-known criminal activities, which occasionally won them some local support. This created a complex situation where some locals saw them as necessary evildoers, or at the very least, the least bad option. When following their code, Knights were seen as noble defenders of their communities, however it was no secret that they were still a cartel, still murderers.

Fall From Grace

The Templars, after the loss of their charismatic leader, started losing cohesion and legitimacy. The men who took leadership after “La Tuta” were not nearly as dedicated to the cartel’s holy mission: they relaxed the stringent code and began to tolerate more and more criminal activities that were prolific in other cartels. Locals began viewing them as hypocritical gangsters, and began resisting the Templar’s rule; this active resistance coincided with increased conflict with the CJNG. The new leadership found itself losing the home front, and losing abroad, with their footmen suffering from terrible morale and discipline. The Mexican government saw the Knights as vulnerable and began directly targeting them, as well as supporting vigilante groups in Michoacan that were engaged in direct combat with the cartel. The “Autodefensas” in Michoacan were a series of grassroots organized fighting forces that began liberating towns and seizing more and more weapons from cartel stockpiles. They quickly began increasing their numbers as they routed the Templars out of rural areas, however out of their recruits were many former cartel members whose interests were not aligned with the peasants fighting for freedom. The group found itself increasingly influenced by other cartels as well as the Mexican government, and their fight for freedom quickly became a proxy war for larger players in Mexico. But while they failed in their goal of ridding Mexico of cartels, they succeeded in crippling the Templars, who buckled under the pressure.

The weight of it all was too much for the Templars, who shattered into several smaller organizations. The CJNG, which is now the largest cartel in Mexico, filled the power vacuum and continued their meteoric rise. The Mexican government, who thought they had successfully destroyed a cartel and struck a major blow to the drug trade, unknowingly helped to accelerate the rise of the CJNG, and for good or ill destroyed the most interesting group of warrior monks they had ever dealt with.