Hundreds of armed vigilantes took control of the Mexican town of Tierra Colorado almost three weeks ago, arresting a dozen local police officers and setting up improvised checkpoints. Vigilante forces also opened fire on a car of tourists after they refused to stop at a roadblock and took the town’s ex-security director into custody.

The reason for this armed takeover was that the vigilante group accused the ex-security director of participating in the killing of vigilante leader Guadalupe Quinones Carbajal on behalf of local drug cartels.

In the words of vigilante spokesman Bruno Placido Valerio: “We have besieged the municipality, because here criminals operate with impunity in broad daylight, in view of municipal authorities. We have detained the director of public security because he is involved with criminals and he knows who killed our commander.”

The vigilantes turned over the arrested ex-security director and police officers to Mexican state prosecutors, who agreed to investigate their alleged ties to drug cartels. Even though only one person was confirmed injured during the takeover, the incident highlights the creation of a third force in the ongoing Mexican drug war.

Mexico’s Three-Way Civil War

Caught in between murderous drug cartels and corrupt government officials, the citizens of dozens of Mexican villages have recently risen up to take the law into their own hands. In the southern state of Guerrero, armed civilian militias are now trying to forbid entry to army officials, federal police and all strangers. Dozens of people with alleged drug cartel connections have been imprisoned to await public trials where local villagers act as judge and jury.

Though crime has declined in many areas taken over by civilian militias, concerns have surfaced that vigilantes may be violating the law and the human rights of people they detain. In addition to those shot for refusing to stop at checkpoints, stories have emerged of brutal torture techniques being used to extract confessions out of people arrested without warrants.

Government authorities have also accused at least one vigilante militia in the northern Michoacán state of being a front for a drug cartel. Whether or not this accusation was true, the army was sent into the region in early March to arrest at least 30 members of the vigilante group. This army operation also freed the six local police officers the group had been holding captive to await “public trial.”

Last month, the government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto sent 4,000 soldiers and 1,000 federal police into the area to combat the Knights Templar drug cartel and disarm the various vigilante networks. After four members of a self-defense group were arrested by 20 government soldiers, 200 villagers took up clubs and surrounded the soldiers until two of the detainees were released.

While Interior Minister Miguel Angelo Osorio Chong said authorities would disarm anyone with a weapon, reports say that many vigilantes are refusing to give up their arms until the drug cartels have first been defeated. This fact has many analysts worrying that the Mexican drug war may soon grow into a three-way civil war between organized crime syndicates, civilian militias and government troops.

America’s Civil Unrest

While the murder and civil pandemonium of Mexico may seem remote to many Americans, the fact is the exact same drug cartels causing so much carnage south of the border are operating in the United States. According to a Fox News report, Mexican drug cartels are now dispatching some of their most trusted agents to work deep inside the U.S.—a strategy designed to tighten their grip on the world’s most lucrative narcotics market.

According to Jack Riley, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Chicago office, “It’s probably the most serious threat the United States has faced from organized crime.”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has estimated that Mexican drug trafficking organizations now operate in 1,286 American cities. Most of these operations are conducted via alliances with America’s major street gangs. Considering that there are approximately 1.4 million active gang members in America, the Mexican cartels are tapping into a demographic force as large as the U.S. military.

In Chicago alone, there are about 100,000 criminal gang members, estimated by the fbi to be responsible for 80 percent of the city’s shootings and murders. These statistics become even more disturbing when you consider that these drug cartels and street gangs are not only cooperating with each other, but also receiving logistical support from Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds Force.

This unholy alliance between Islamic terrorists, Mexican cartel agents and American street gangs represents America’s most serious domestic security threat!

Using a similar reasoning process to the vigilante militias in Mexico, American citizens are buying weapons and personal firearms at a historically high rate. In the four years since Barack Obama was first elected president, an estimated 67 million firearms have been purchased in the United States—more than were purchased in almost seven years before his first election. According to a New Yorker magazine article from last year, there are now nearly 300 million privately owned firearms in the U.S.

As the economy in Detroit deteriorates and crime skyrockets, the city is already experiencing an upsurge in American vigilantism. A high-ranking Wayne County official toldThe Daily last year that a rise in “justifiable” homicides and vigilante justice has taken hold in the city as an overloaded court system turns a blind eye.

“It’s like the militiamen who stepped up way back when,” said James Jackson, a 63-year-old retired Detroit police officer who has personally patrolled the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood on the city’s southeast side for years. “They’re ready to fight. We [rarely] see police anymore.”

Some Detroit neighborhoods, such as East Indian Village and Boston-Edison, have even hired private security firms to send out armed patrols in neighborhoods where official police patrols are notoriously behind schedule.

With this being the case, how much longer will it be until American cities start seeing Mexican-style civilian defense militias?

The American government is apparently seriously considering the threat of such civil unrest and has already made moves toward establishing a military-backed, federalized police force. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (dhs) is currently in the process of stockpiling more than 1.6 billion rounds of hollow-point ammunition, along with 7,000 fully-automatic nato personal defense weapons plus a huge stash of 30-round, high-capacity magazines.

To cap these purchases off, the dhs, through the U.S. Army Forces Command, recently purchased and retrofitted 2,717 Mine-Resistant Armored Protection vehicles formerly used for counterinsurgency in Iraq. These are specifically designed to protect occupants from ambush attacks, incorporating bullet-proof windows designed to withstand small-arms fire, such as that from .223-caliber rifles.

Why would a federal law enforcement agency need such military hardware, unless the government was anticipating massive civil unrest? Is this the type of force then presidential candidate Obama referred to in his 2008 campaign remarks? During these remarks, he said, “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”

The arms race between America’s street gangs, America’s citizens and America’s government certainly does resemble the three-way civil war currently raging in Mexico. Is America headed for massive civil unrest? Current conditions make it easy to imagine frightened citizens taking up arms against the organized crime syndicates operating with impunity across the nation. If this happened, would the American government take a note from the Mexican playbook, sending federalized police to declare martial law and disarm citizens?

Ezekiel’s Prophecy

This whole horrific situation is a perfect example of the natural consequences that come of breaking God’s law. If the American people would not have abandoned biblical family values, an entire generation of youth would not have been driven into hopelessness as they have. Then they would not have turned to drugs and gangs as a form of escapism. If the proliferation of drugs never happened, the unholy alliance between terrorists, cartel agents and street gangs would have never formed.

If this criminal network never formed, American citizens would never have had to resort to vigilantism as a means of self-protection. If this criminal network never formed, the government would never have had the threat of civil unrest to use as an excuse to trash the Constitution and establish a militarized police force.

In the first chapter of Isaiah and the fifth chapter of Ezekiel, God reveals that the cities of end-time Israel will burn with fire, pestilence and widespread violence as a consequence of the people’s rebellion against God’s law. Ezekiel’s account adds even more detail, explaining that one third of the population will be killed in violent looting and rioting just before the country is invaded by the modern-day descendents of the ancient Chaldeans.

The current tension between American street gangs, American citizens and American government is leading to the ultimate fulfillment of this prophecy. Be sure to read both editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s new booklet America Under Attack and the fourth chapter of Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet to understand how events will unfold in the United States and British Commonwealth nations.

While other scriptures foretell of a soon-coming time of peace and prosperity for the biblical nations of Israel (and the rest of the planet), the sad truth is that humanity is going to have to go through a time of intense suffering before they are willing to accept God’s rule on Earth.