Two significant features of modern Mexico are the lack of a civic culture and government corruption. A story from the NY Times illustrates both as a mob seizes and kills two brothers. Growing vigilante actions track violence between Cartels using public threats as an attempt to assert control in a country flying apart. This picture is from an action in Nuevo Laredo about 2012 of one Cartel threatening another using lynchings. Such tactics are beginning to appear by outraged publics lacking trust in municipal police. The two brothers were working as pollsters visiting the town, Ajalpan, and were perceived as kidnappers of village children. The community is about 200 miles southeast of Mexico City in the state of Puebla.

The killings raise difficult questions for Mexico, highlighting an alarming development: By some accounts, there were more public lynchings this past year than at any other time in more than a quarter-century. There were at least 78 lynchings last year in Mexico, more than double the number the previous year, according to data collected by Raúl Rodríguez Guillén, a professor and an author of the book “Mexico Lynchings, 1988-2014.”

The mob actions were born of a sense of hopelessness and impotence shared by many in Mexico, where 98 percent of murders go unsolved and the state is virtually absent in some areas. By some estimates, just 12 percent of crimes are even reported in Mexico, largely because of a lack of faith that justice will ever be served.