New massacre in Guanajuato: organized crime kills four police officers

As confirmed by the local Secretariat of Civil Protection, four municipal police officers have been murdered while patrolling the highway connecting the municipalities of Celaya and Salvatierra in Guanajuato. The agents were attacked by an armed commando with gunfire near the community of Santa Maria del Refugio on Wednesday at around 8 p.m. “The place where they were attacked with bullets, and despite repelling the attack, they died on the spot,” indicates the statement of the Celaya agency, which assures that “it is part of the fight against crime. There will be no retreat.”

Massacres occur in Guanajuato. The state, ruled by PAN member Diego Sinhu Rodríguez, is sinking into a cycle of violence. Many murders are happening one after the other but it seems that the government or the prosecutor’s office is not able to stop them. Four Celaya police officers were killed while they were trying to protect the highway connecting two municipalities affected by the massacre of young people.

On December 4, the bodies of brothers Fabián and Jesús Orozco Mateos, their cousin Pedro Mateos Puente, and their friends Brian Jesús Amoles, José Eduardo Freire Ortega, and Luis Giovanni Juárez. He was a medical student at the Universidad Latina at the Celaya campus. He had various signs of violence, including a gun. The eldest was 23 years old, the youngest was 18 years old. The Prosecutor’s Office has arrested an alleged perpetrator of the crime, whose name or affiliation to any organized group is unknown. Nor has anything been revealed about the direction of the investigation and the motive for the murder of the six students.

A few days later, terror struck Guanajuato again. Eleven young people were murdered while celebrating a Christmas party on a farm in Salvatierra. The country, accustomed to such celebrations in the month of December, is shocked by this attack. So far, the hypothesis is that several members of organized crime arrived at the place where young people were holding their event, wanted to enter, and when they were not allowed, they returned with more attackers and killed the boys. Shot down. “They just came, barged in and shot without stopping,” Angie Almanza, a relative of two victims, told EL País, adding that their only objective was to kill. 195 bullet casings were found at the spot.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who tried to blame the young people by pointing to “drug abuse” at the beginning of both cases, has also put pressure on the Guanajuato prosecutor, Carlos Zamarripa, and named him among the main responsible. One is told. For the wave of violence that plagues the unit. “More research is needed,” the president said in December. Since then, nothing has improved. The year began with an afternoon of terror in the state due to drug blockades and burning of vehicles by organized crime.

Guanajuato is mostly controlled by the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, led by José Antonio Yápez Ortiz alias ‘El Marro’, who is currently in prison. The region is now being contested by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of Mexico’s strongest criminal organizations. The killing of police officers is the latest example of a country where violence is not stopping. According to the civil organization Causa en Comun, Guanajuato was the state where public security agents were murdered the most, with 60 cases during 2023.

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