It all started with the warning of the
trailers
.
Radio messages where they warned, since Tuesday afternoon, that the tragedy was coming to the towns.
Armed men to destroy a city, dozens of vans with handmade armor, drilled to fit assault rifles of a caliber capable of taking down helicopters, marked with an X, as in a war, so as not to be confused with the enemy.
They were moving fast north, according to truck drivers, who tried to warn hours in advance of what was about to happen.
With no one hot on their heels, aware of the power of their pistols, these men dressed in military gear and tactical gear took the time to put gas in their cars, to record themselves on video showing off their artillery and cylinder capacity: “The
Chapiza
: we come with everything”.
On Tuesday night no one looked at Caborca, the last city in the Sonoran desert that communicates with the United States.
And the ruthless sons of the world's biggest drug trafficker, Joaquín
El Chapo
Guzmán, were about to besiege an entire town again.
While this was happening, all the national information was overwhelmed by the division between the supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his opponents due to a journalistic investigation against the eldest son of the president;
the inhabitants of the wealthy areas of Roma and Condesa, in the capital, protested in networks for the "Yankee invasion" that has triggered rents;
the journalists joined for the first time because they are being killed in the provinces, that there were going to be no questions;
the country boiled from the center and while that was happening, a war had just broken out in the north, but also in Michoacán, Colima, Guerrero or Zacatecas, and thousands of inhabitants prayed in their homes so that the bullets would not go through the Wall.
Around seven o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, a convoy with more than 20 trucks paraded from Altar (Sonora) to Caborca, about 35 kilometers to the north.
This handful of desert miles divides the power of two main drug cartels, historically united.
In Altar, the children of El Chapo, known as Los Chapitos
, have become strong
, more bloodthirsty and unpredictable than his father was, according to the experts consulted.
In this remote town a few kilometers from the United States, drug trafficking has found another very profitable business in recent years: migrants.
Up to this point come all the dramas that spread to the rest of the country, the thousands of overcrowded people in Tapachula, the other thousands who manage to get out of detention centers, those who manage to move north.
A funnel of hundreds of them each day, seeking to cross to the other side for prices ranging from $4,500 to $7,500 per person.
And in Caborca, the heirs of the historic capo of the 1990s, Rafael Caro Quintero, hold power, grouped under his lieutenant, nicknamed
El Cara de Cochi
.
All from Sinaloa and all former associates who have controlled the desert routes for decades for drug trafficking to the United States.
The capture of the leaders, that of El Chapo and the decline of Caro —after 28 years in prison and now a fugitive— has fragmented the powerful Sinaloa cartel, which is fighting for this coveted plaza.
Los Chapitos want all the business: the drug routes, the weapons and the migrants, say veteran reporters in the area.
For this reason, they threaten and besiege, whenever they feel like it, the enemy's city.
The shots were heard getting closer.
A 45-year-old resident of Caborca tells from the other end of the phone how since 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday they knew, through WhatsApp groups, what the trailer drivers had warned
.
She also knew from that moment the police, the National Guard and even the Army.
They
went into their houses and waited for the siege of their town to begin without an authority preventing it.
From their halls and rooms they heard gunshots relentlessly for hours, the
blast
of machine guns more and more clearly.
And the tachycardia, the collective psychosis: "Are we leaving here? Where? To a hotel? Will they come for me?"
“It starts off like you're in a war zone, like they're going against the city.
We heard the first shots at 12 midnight and the last ones at 6 am on Wednesday.
No one slept, ”says the woman, who prefers not to give her name for fear of reprisals from the drug trafficker.
What no resident of Caborca understands is how a convoy of that size could pass in front of the detachment of the National Guard, with more than 150 men, and later, another of the Secretary of Defense, without anyone, not a single soldier, appeared to defend the town.
Much less the municipal police.
“There was not a single authority that came out to confront him, all the corporations hid.
They left us alone, they abandoned us,” says the neighbor.
And it is not the first time something like this has happened, those same men, who at that time numbered more than 100, took the city in March of last year.
It was not a confrontation between cartels, but a declaration of intent.
From a show of force that began with the capture of the city, desolate at that time, with shootings at houses, holes in their facades, the murder of two men who were left lying in the street and the search for possible enemies in houses.
"A neighbor told me how the assassins looked out the windows, from the rooftops, with their weapons, as if looking for people, possibly drug dealers of the opposite, with all the impunity in the world," adds the woman.
With one of the vans they knocked down the electric gate of the Uribe's house at three in the morning.
When Eduardo Uribe's mother woke up, a group of 10 gunmen had surrounded her bed.
They were looking for his son.
He was sleeping in another room with his friend, Sebastián Manríquez, the son of a veteran journalist from Caborca.
They were both taken by force, despite the screams and pleas of the desperate mother.
They were loaded into two different vans.
At 8 pm the next day, Wednesday, Manríquez appeared.
His friend has appeared alive this Thursday.
Three more were kidnapped that night, two are still missing.
This Thursday, Caborca is still injured.
Schools have closed, the municipal president, Abraham David Mier Nogales, has recommended an unofficial curfew for businesses at 10 p.m.
"I recognize that the events experienced this morning exceeded the level of response of the police corporations, since we were not able to prevent these unfortunate events," acknowledged the mayor.
The Army, the police and the National Guard were deployed on Wednesday at the entrance to the municipality, when the bullets had not been heard for hours.
“We already know what this is like.
The operations last two or three days and then the corporations relax.
And the same situation returns.
As if they were giving them a
chance
to the assassins, vacations, while they simulate that they have control”, points out an outraged neighbor.
Just six days ago, López Obrador undertook a tour of Sonora, governed by his former head of Security, Alfonso Durazo, governor since September.
The tour included the revision of the works in baseball stadiums and meetings with authorities of the Yécora, Seri and Yaqui peoples.
The federal government's strategy, as has happened in another of the country's hottest spots, Michoacán, is to increase the presence of soldiers and National Guard agents.
But the number of soldiers has not prevented the shooting, neither in Sonora, nor in Michoacán or Zacatecas, another of the states with the most presence of organized crime in the last year.
The State, of almost three million inhabitants, has a homicide rate of around five a day.
In 2021, 1,968 people were murdered, a figure that has not stopped growing and that broke a lethal record of 23% more deaths than the previous year.
Durazo turned the issue of insecurity into his main axis of campaign in the elections of June last year, and came to take advantage of the seven National Guard barracks built in the State, as well as the deployment of almost 3,000 troops of the controversial body of military spirit born expressly to control violence in the country.
Formed by ex-military and ex-police officers, the civilian command of the National Guard was in charge of Durazo as head of Security.
But the violence, after his five months of Government in the entity, continues to be the main pending debt.
The criminals left Caborca after 24 hours of siege.
At least a hundred men who had the ability to walk around with long weapons and record themselves in videos that they posted on social networks while they took to the streets without an authority putting a stop to them.
Hidden in their homes, a citizenry cornered by the real power that governs their people.
And so, until the next intervention.
The campaign promises, the pomposity of the soldiers and the barracks, have been silenced by force of bullets.
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