Three dead, four wounded and 84 shell casings.
That is the balance given by the authorities after the murder of the politician Salvador Llamas, an official of the Puerto Vallarta City Council and a candidate for Morena - the party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador - to the Government of Jalisco.
“It is an aggression completely designed and orchestrated by organized crime,” state prosecutor Luis Joaquín Méndez said at a press conference this weekend, less than 48 hours after the attack.
“It was an execution,” López Obrador said this Monday, “they were about him.”
The president has promised that a detailed report on the events that occurred last Friday in a restaurant in Guadalajara, the third most populous city in Mexico, will be delivered in the coming days.
For now,
the reconstruction of those in charge of the investigations reveals that only 36 minutes passed between the arrival of Llamas at the business and the escape of his aggressors.
It is a practically choreographic sequence, in which the assassins sit at the table with him and then shoot him down.
Llamas arrived accompanied by a group of escorts at the Sonora Grill on Terranova Avenue at 5:32 p.m., according to the information presented by the Jalisco Prosecutor's Office.
The official appears alone at the entrance of the place in the images of the security cameras, carrying a backpack.
Just nine minutes later, at 5:41 p.m., two individuals named among the aggressors also arrived.
One of them was wearing a red shirt, blue jeans, a black mask and a cap.
The other enters behind him in a light-colored shirt.
Always according to the timeline of the authorities, these are the ones who sit at the politician's table, while the bodyguards stay outside the place to give "perimeter protection" to their boss.
Three minutes after six in the evening, two more people who allegedly participated in the murder appear at the scene: a woman in a green dress who entered hand in hand with a man in a blue shirt.
The couple passed one of the two assassins who had arrived 20 minutes earlier, the man in the red shirt, at the entrance.
In the images, it is seen how the subject who leaves puts a weapon in the back of his pants.
At 6:04 p.m. the shooting began.
The man who had stayed at the table with Llamas opens fire on him.
The images presented by the authorities of the moment of the attack are blurred.
Prosecutor Méndez assured that the shooter ran towards the kitchen area of the restaurant to escape through the back, but that he suddenly returned to the scene of the crime.
The man got under a kind of island of the premises, a table where it seems that some food was prepared, and changed his clothes.
Moments later, he was no longer wearing the light-colored shirt, but a darker one.
Hearing the shots, Llamas' escorts entered the restaurant.
The head of the bodyguards, Luis Fernando Muñoz, died in the shooting inside the premises.
The Prosecutor's Office did not present images of the entrance of Muñoz, also identified as a former commissioner of Puerto Vallarta, to the place.
At 6:08 p.m., the man who entered accompanied by a woman left the restaurant holstering a long weapon that he pointed at the escorts' vehicle, which was already in front of the business entrance.
The authorities presume, in fact, that the weapon he was carrying was that of former Commissioner Muñoz.
A man in a red shirt, originally wearing a light-colored shirt, covers his back.
The escorts fired at the gunman who pointed their gun at them, who died lying on the sidewalk outside the site.
The other subject in red managed to escape.
Authorities have identified at least eight people involved in the murder, including the four identified in the recordings.
At the crime scene, the agents seized nine long and nine short weapons, as well as the 84 shell casings.
Some of the rifles belonged to the aggressors and others to the escorts.
Two Chevrolet trucks were also seized at the scene: a white Tahoe and a silver Suburban.
Three other vehicles were seized as part of the investigations.
Authorities assume they were abandoned during the attackers' escape.
One of them is a Nissan Frontier and was found six blocks from the restaurant.
It is painted with the logo of a private security company and inside were found five .223-caliber shell casings, used for hunting weapons and semi-automatic rifles, and a rifle cartridge with a caliber similar to that used by NATO forces.
Another is a Nissan Altima, found within a radius of less than 500 meters from the restaurant, which had false license plates and two buckets full of “tire punctures”, sharp stars that criminals tend to throw on the pavement to escape.
The third is a General Motors Yukon truck, already two miles from the Sonora Grill,
Llamas began his political career in Zacatecas, his home state, in the ranks of the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (PVEM).
In 2016 he was a candidate for the state government under the Citizen Movement letterhead, but he was denied registration for not submitting his campaign reports on time.
In that election he supported the candidacy of the Party of the Democratic Revolution and the National Action Party for the municipal presidency of the homonymous capital of Zacatecas, which came in third place.
In 2018 he sought to be a local representative of Zacatecas for the PVEM, but lost.
For 2021 he was coordinator of the campaign of the morenista Luis Michel to the municipal presidency of Puerto Vallarta.
During the contest he assured that he was threatened by a group of hooded men.
After Michel's triumph, he was appointed as the person in charge of water, drainage and sewerage in Vallarta.
The appointment was not without controversy.
The General Secretariat of the City Council presented an official letter at the end of last July in which it accused Llamas of lying about the year of his birth and his university degree, which made him ineligible for the position.
Eventually, the official left that position and a month ago was appointed head of the municipal Cabinet.
He was also chosen as Morena's state adviser last September, in the midst of the party's internal process to shore up its structure and organize the election of the presidential candidate for 2024. That placed him in the deck of possible contenders for the governorship and even in voting intention surveys.
Also,
Local media reports about thirty complaints against Llamas, including threats against journalists, which did not prosper in court.
The official always denied the accusations against him and attributed them to "political bashing."
John Ackerman, a member of Morena, wrote on his social networks that, according to what he had been told, Llamas "is a narco from Vallarta" and that he had become a councilor thanks to the "carried" vote, which provoked criticism within the party itself. .
Prosecutor Méndez said that for now it cannot be confirmed that he had ties to organized crime, but that this was part of the investigations.
He also did not comment further on why he had a team of escorts of such depth, with a former commissioner at the helm.
The Prosecutor's Office added that it is not known where the backpack that Llamas was carrying when he entered the restaurant is or what he was carrying inside.
The local press has linked the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) with the attack, which occurred in an area of high police surveillance, less than two kilometers from Casa Jalisco, the official residence of Governor Enrique Alfaro.
Mendez, however, refused to say which criminal group was involved, saying there was going to be speculation about the contents of the backpack and whether it was a bribe.
In December 2018, former Governor Aristóteles Sandoval was assassinated in a bar in Vallarta, in a crime to which the CJNG was also linked.
López Obrador has pointed out that "there is no evidence" of Llamas's alleged collusion with the
narco
and has settled that Morena does not establish a "relationship of complicity with anyone."
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