Municipal Police personnel monitor the home where seven people were murdered, in the municipality of Boca del Río, Veracruz, on July 4, 2022. Miguel Victoria (EFE)
Three men, three women and a child were killed around midnight on Sunday in a neighborhood in the coastal municipality of Boca del Río, Veracruz.
An armed group broke into the house where they were resting and riddled them with bullets, as confirmed by the State Prosecutor's Office.
Neighbors alerted authorities to the massacre around 11:45 p.m.
They had heard multiple shots very close and the streets of this Primero de Mayo Sur neighborhood became ground zero for the tragedy, with a strong police presence.
So far no one has been arrested.
The Boca del Río massacre displaces the terror of drug violence this time to the southeast of the country.
Veracruz, one of the states with the most disappeared (almost 6,000 people) and strewn with clandestine graves with hundreds of corpses, has become this Monday the new epicenter of unpunished violence that does not stop in the country.
In Mexico, 100 people a day are murdered.
And every week dawns with new corpses without culprits, in Zacatecas, Michoacán, Guanajuato, Baja California or Tamaulipas.
The Prosecutor's Office has not provided a clue about the aggressors.
There is no information on what gang the men who entered a house and gunned down everyone who was resting there in cold blood could have belonged to.
Nor have they explained how it is possible that, once again, a commando armed to the teeth unleashes terror in a few blocks of this coastal city without an authority preventing it.
Of the seven members of the family, one managed to survive the lead blast for a few hours.
But he died shortly after in hospital, according to local press information.
The only information available about them is that they had a meat business.
The Attorney General, Verónica Hernández Giadáns, reiterated that, on this occasion, "as in all cases of attacks against Veracruz citizens, there will be no impunity."
But impunity in the country exceeds 94% of cases.
Less than one in 10 is resolved.
A climate of lack of justice such that any massacre is free for the murderers.
The State Attorney General's Office reports that an investigation folder has been opened for the events in which seven people, three women and four men, including a minor, lost their lives, which occurred around 11:45 p.m. on Sunday, July 3 ,
– FGE Veracruz (@FGE_Veracruz) July 4, 2022
Violence in the country has become the main pending account of the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The multiple murder just over a week ago in the north, in the heart of the Sierra Tarahumara (Chihuahua), which claimed the lives of two Jesuit priests, a tour guide and two other missing men, caused pressure from the Church to contain the homicides that shake the country.
Pope Francis came to speak out about what happened, denounced the crime against the priests and numerous religious organizations continue to press these days for the authorities to take action on the matter.
Well, the president, from his campaign promises, kept the slogan of "hugs, not bullets", which haunts him with every death, every murdered family.
The strategy sought by the federal government focuses on more aid to young people, scholarships that save them from populating the ranks of organized crime.
A long-term plan that seeks to leave the big drug cartels without a quarry.
He also fights drug traffickers in key areas, although the operations are never announced as major coups, since he is against an open war like the one Felipe Calderón undertook in 2006 and Enrique Peña Nieto continued until 2018. A battle that caused the number of disappeared and dead multiplied to record numbers of violence.
Despite campaign promises, the country has not been pacified.
The narco kills with the same virulence as when he took power at the end of 2018. The figure of 100 murders a day had not been reached even in the worst moments of the war against drugs of previous leaders.
And, although López Obrador maintains that there has been a “containment” in the number of homicides.
The reality is that the death toll is so high for a country that is not officially at war that a reduction of a handful of deaths per year does not solve the tragedy.
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