Forensic agents working at the crime scene in Tonalá, Jalisco.FERNANDO CARRANZA / Reuters
The deaths accumulate on the outskirts of Guadalajara.
On Saturday around 6:00 p.m., an armed group gunned down 11 workers, mostly bricklayers, while they waited for their employer's payment in Tonalá (the metropolitan area of the capital of Jalisco).
The high-caliber bullets, but especially the number of victims, alerted an entity that has suffered the relentless onslaught of organized crime for years.
A few hours earlier, two more had been shot dead in a more central area.
And that same morning, a man hanged with a bullet in the skull.
Violence keeps this city and its metropolitan area fenced off on a daily basis.
The governor, Enrique Alfaro, a staunch opponent of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has shown this Monday incapable of facing this war alone and has demanded the urgent support of the federal authorities: “This cannot continue like this.
The fight against organized crime is the responsibility of the federal government by constitutional provision ”.
Once again, our city suffered an attack that hurts, that angers, that steals tranquility.
Yesterday 13 people lost their lives in two multi-homicides, clearly perpetrated by organized crime, in La Jauja, Tonalá, and in Lomas del Pedregal, Guadalajara.
- Enrique Alfaro (@EnriqueAlfaroR) February 28, 2021
The bodies of the victims were scattered on three meters of sidewalk and the blood mixed with the dirt of Rucias Negras street.
This has been the fifth multiple homicide registered in 2021 in Jalisco.
There are no detainees and there are no videos of the attack on public security cameras, according to the authorities.
A brutal and unpunished crime that once again shakes the third most important city in the country - along with Mexico City and Monterrey (in Nuevo León) - the cultural and economic headquarters of Mexico.
It is not the first time that assault rifles and war caps have been used to pepper people on the outskirts of Guadalajara.
The most powerful drug cartel in the country is based in this state, according to the DEA, that of Jalisco Nueva Generación.
Led by the new public enemy of the anti-drug agency, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes,
El Mencho
.
A criminal organization that has expanded its power since 2017 throughout the territory and that maintains a war in its own land with other smaller ones, but financed by the big ones, such as the Sinaloa Cartel.
A guerrilla that keeps under siege the poor neighborhoods on the outskirts, with bodies tortured, dismembered and thrown in the gutters.
Also, from time to time, violence creeps into the center and images of war arrive in messages of terror to the wealthy class of the capital.
But the massacre of 11 people tarnishes the image of one of Mexico's cultural and economic capitals.
Guadalajara is home to the world's largest book fair in Spanish - FIL - and for a long time a promising campaign was promoted by the Government to attract the most relevant technology companies in the world: the Mexican Silicon Valley, they called it.
The governor who promoted this program, Aristóteles Sandoval (from 2013 to 2018), of the PRI, was killed by a gunshot to the skull in a Puerto Vallarta bar in December.
Neither of this crime nor of almost any that happens in Jalisco, there is justice.
Well, they only arrested the managers of the premises who erased the traces of the crime.
Alfaro celebrated a few months ago the drop in crimes of lesser impact in the State.
A success with little merit due to the closures and lockdowns caused by the pandemic.
But above all, because it was useless if fewer cars or cell phones were stolen, if the next morning 18 bags with human remains were thrown in front of the emblematic soccer stadium of Las Chivas de Guadalajara.
This Monday, the governor has demanded the help that this type of fight requires, since the fight against drug trafficking is a federal crime.
President López Obrador has responded to him in his morning conference: “The presence of the National Guard, the Army and the Navy, of the Armed Forces in these States will be reinforced.
I already instructed it, I ordered it a month ago.
More elements are being mobilized, yesterday I raised it again and this morning was the instruction ”.
The entities to which the president refers and that lead the most lethal areas of the country these days are, in addition to Jalisco, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and Michoacán.
All with the presence of the Jalisco Cartel.
The Guadalajara metropolitan area has witnessed in recent months scenes more typical of the war against drug trafficking than its leaders, including federal authorities, have been willing to acknowledge.
The shooting in early February outside a family restaurant that left one dead, one missing and at least two wounded, revealed that one of the most important cities in the country was in the hands of organized crime.
A de facto power that can walk around with impunity with assault rifles, shoot down its target in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses and security cameras, and nothing happens.
There are no suspects, no detainees, and no hypothesis of what happened that afternoon.
The political battle for responsibility for the deaths has been a constant since López Obrador assumed power in 2018. Alfaro leads, along with eight other governors, an opposition alliance to the federal government.
All from parties opposed to the president, who have publicly opposed his government's controversial measures, such as the major refinery infrastructure works and the Mayan Train, the budget cut and, more recently, the strategy to face the pandemic and vaccination.
On the eve of the legislative, state (only some states) and municipal elections in June, no ruler wants to take on one of the pending issues that plagues the country: the violence that kills almost 80 people a day, according to data from February.
The 14 corpses of this Saturday placed this weekend as the most violent of this year, with 270 deaths in total.
And one of the deadliest days in its history.
Figures that return to the public debate the pending issue of this and previous governments.
Figures of violence that surpass the worst times of the war against drug trafficking and that add to the drama of displacement and ghost towns and thousands of families searching for their disappeared in mass graves.
A tragedy that does not appear often in the electoral campaign programs, impregnated these days by the aid derived from the pandemic, and that Mexico endures every day without a government having managed to stop it.
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