Mexican vigilante movement dismisses spokesman

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Vigilantes who have spent the last year beating back a drug cartel in Mexico said Thursday they have dismissed their chief spokesman after he used unusually blunt language to challenge President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Dashing vigilante leader Jose Manuel Mireles had become the public face of the “self-defense” movement in the western state of Michoacan, where the coalition of farmers, ranchers and laborers is fighting the Knights Templar cartel that had strangled the largely agricultural state with extortion demands, kidnappings and killings.