Attention all college students planning this year’s Spring Break: I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that, if you were planning on road-tripping down to Mexico for a week-long beach party laden with booze, cheap pharmaceuticals, and meaningless sex, this is probably the wrong year to do it, as Mexico is currently experiencing a severe crime wave and a subsequent break-down in law enforcement. But the good news is that if you’ve always dreamed of spending a week wearing a mask and cape and taking the law into your own hands, now’s your chance!

The epicenter of the new Mexican vigilantism appears to be Ciudad Juárez, right across the border from El Paso, Texas. According to Time magazine, Ciudad Juárez is, “Mexico’s deadliest city with 1,600 murders last year.” Time paints a grisly picture of a nation in chaos, where,

“The conviction rate in the thousands of murders and kidnappings afflicting the nation every year is estimated to be as low as 5%. Women and children are also increasingly among those killed by criminal gangs.”

A 5% conviction rate? That’s a figure right out of Batman Begins, and this is more or less the point. When a police force is so blatantly unable or unwilling to protect their citizens, the citizens are likely to get pissed off enough to do something about it. Enter the Juárez Citizens Command, or in Spanish, Comando Ciudadano por Juarez (CCJ), a sort of experiment in “organized vigilantism.” Last month The El Paso Times reported that:

“A group calling itself the Juárez Citizens Command is threatening to strike back against lawlessness that has gripped the city for more than a year by killing one criminal a day until order is restored.”

The El Paso Times quotes a press release put out by the CCJ in January, where they declared,

“Better the death of a bad person, than that bad person continue contaminating our region,”

and continued with the equally-grim:

“Our mission is to finish each 24 hours with the life of a criminal. The hour has come to stop this disorder in Juárez.”

This is all quite dark, and it only gets darker. Time cites a case earlier this month in Mexico City, in which a man shot and killed another man attempting a forced entry. Mexican tabloids ran photos of the burglar’s corpse with the headline, “Dead Rat,” and ran quotes of neighbors praising the shooter’s initiative.

This implies a couple of things. First off, that Mexico needs its own Batman. Second off, any applicants for the role of Batman are likely to get away with just about anything, including murder. I’m not suggesting you should do this, of course, because you will undoubtedly end up dead, dear reader. No, now that the vigilante gauntlet has been thrown down, I believe there is only one sure solution: roving bands of brightly-costumed, masked luchadores. Thousands of them, filling the streets, preventing robberies, and… wrestling. Think about it. It would rule.