None of the protesters carried heavy firearms. Six of them had registered handguns, which they placed on the ground. Others carried sticks and branches pulled from lime trees, according to multiple witness testimonies and images that appear in this report. No one fired a shot. Five of the brothers, in fact, had served in the ranks of armed civilian groups sanctioned by Castillo.
The rural guards, men forged by the lime fields they toil, protested because their unit had been dissolved twenty days before and they had not been paid. They were also suffering from new incursions by the Knights Templar on their businesses. He said he was about to obey, when a few meters away he saw another man kneeling, hands raised and held at gunpoint by the uniformed men.
Then he witnessed the man's execution. According to these testimonies, at am, between Ave. Six days after the events, he declared that the attacks had left a toll of one person ran over by a car, and eight deaths due to a "crossfire.
Members of the Madrigal family died embracing one another. Photo courtesy of a witness to the massacre. They also feared authorities would try to evict them. The soldiers attempted to dismantle the barricade that the G said they had set up to stop a Knights Templar incursion in a small rancho nearby called Lomas de Hoyos. Because of that, Sierra showed up at midnight at the city hall encampment, ordering his group to not fall to the soldiers' "provocation," in order to avoid being treated "as criminals.
Some rural policemen napped on their trucks. Others chatted in the plaza. The federal police convoy parked its vehicles on the backstreets of the city hall.
