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By all of them.”Īfter the first few days in captivity, she said, she started asking the men what they wanted sexually, and how, so that they’d stop beating her when they raped her. During that time, she said she was raped repeatedly. She was held captive for four days, along with some friends of hers. Maria Lopez, who asked VICE World News not to use her real name because she didn’t want her family to learn what had happened to her, said she was kidnapped in a restaurant in broad daylight by a group of young cartel henchmen. Jacobo Miller, also known by his friends and followers as “Master,” is on a mission to prove that if women can change their mental attitude, they’re capable of defending themselves with anything, from a car key to a pen. Now, it’s about security and keeping us safe,” she told me. “With things the way they are, with so much violence, there’s no room for terror. “I wanted to have the confidence to do it,” she said. Tessa, who is an accountant and mother of three, decided to take the course after she was robbed twice at gunpoint. But with this,” he said, brandishing a Glock, "with a gun, we’re equals.” “A 60-kilo woman will struggle to confront a 90-kilo man with her fists.
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Female participation, he added, continues to increase. “Sixty percent of those who come are women,” said Jacobo Miller. Jacobo Miller is hell-bent on trying to convince many ordinary women in Culiacán to learn self-defense. Fajardo Campos chose to defend herself rather than plead guilty and put her family at risk. Legal gun ownership in Mexico is both rare and expensive, and his courses are popular.
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Tessa and two other women were on a legal shooting range under the supervision of Abel Jacobo Miller, a licensed weapons owner and instructor, on a sun-bleached Sunday morning in May. Fed up with both the generalized and gender-focused violence imposed, in part, by the city’s criminal bosses and the narco-culture they’ve spawned, she and other women in the area have decided to take matters, and weapons, into their own hands. Tessa, 45, is a lifelong resident of Culiacán.