Two girls who are less than six years old played little races this Saturday in the patio of their house in Jesús María.
As strollers, they held in their small hands a few pieces of plastic from a wrecked van.
They used the floor for the runway, a carpet of broken glass and casings of all calibers.
"Watch out," one warns the other.
They dodge a mound of bulletproof vests piled with bloody military uniforms and continue playing without understanding what is happening around them.
At their feet they have a town lost in the middle of the Sinaloan mountains that was devastated by the last battle of the Mexican Army against the Sinaloa Cartel.
About 100 meters away, the house of the drug trafficker Ovidio Guzmán, still with the doors open, but empty inside.
With pride illuminating their faces,
The town of Jesús María, with barely 5,000 inhabitants, went to sleep on Wednesday night in total normality.
Around four in the morning, many neighbors jumped out of bed due to the horrible noises that could be heard outside.
The Army and the National Guard had launched the operation to capture Guzmán, which they had been planning for six months, after the failure of 2019, in which they had to release him hours after his arrest.
The war then broke out between the federal forces and dozens of hit men who came out to defend one of the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel faction that operates under the name
Los Chapitos
, in honor of Joaquín
El Chapo
Guzmán.
Bullets came from all sides, and an Armed Forces helicopter began shooting from the air over the houses.
The entire town was turned into a war field.
Culiacán, the capital of the State, is separated from the ranch by about 45 kilometers that concentrate these days about thirty completely burned cars and trucks blocking the way.
Among them, a s
andcat
, a huge armored truck from the Army, burned and abandoned in the middle of the road.
A Mexican Army truck destroyed during the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán. Gladys Serrano
The arch that begins Jesús María receives anyone who dares to enter this dangerous place, normally taken over by the organization led by the sons of El Chapo Guzmán, with a completely shot sign.
Below, a van with handmade armor that left a group of hitmen lying next to some boxes of Winchester bullets with a caliber of 5.56 millimeters.
On the rear window it reads "La Chapiza", the name given to the young hit men who are at the service of the cartel.
José's property was left in the middle of the thick of it.
Some hit men who had been fleeing from Ovidio's house left their armored trucks lying in the courtyard and entered his house.
From there they fired at the security forces.
The tin roof still shows dozens of perforations left by the bullets that rained from the sky.
Inside, there was a trail of casings, 50 caliber, from the Barrett rifles used by the criminals.
"We were in the middle, we wanted to go out, but we couldn't," says José, who sheltered his family in a small room.
One of the thugs arrived with two bullet wounds in his arm and asked him to help him, he says.
José gave him what he had at home, an ibuprofen, and bandaged him so he wouldn't bleed to death.
"No way, what else could I do."
The combat rumbled for more than 10 hours in which none of the neighbors wanted to poke their noses out of their houses.
Despite this, some were injured from the crossing by open fire.
"The sound was scary because it is a small ranch and everything was heard very close," says a woman who prefers not to give her name for security reasons.
She was called by a neighbor who had been grazed by a bullet inside her house: "She told me: 'I've got it [in reference to the impact of the projectile], take care of my children, please."
Another woman further away from the hot zone took refuge under her bed with her two daughters when the shootings broke out.
Hiding there, she received a bullet that entered through the roof of her house and ended up at her foot.
“The girl was screaming and trembling and I was bleeding to death, no matter how much she squeezed me, I removed the cable from the iron and tied it up,” she says, lying on a mattress with her bandaged foot.
She lost blood for hours hiding in a corner of her house.
“I thought we weren't freeing her,” says the woman, who doesn't want to give her name for fear of reprisals.
At noon on Thursday, the family finally dared to go out into the street to ask for medical help.
María Zavala receives medical attention in the company of her aunt, at her home in Jesús María. Gladys Serrano
Faced with such an onslaught, María Alejandra also took refuge under the bed with her 94-year-old aunt.
They were there for nine hours, hardly moving.
The only thing they dared to do was pray.
"The house was cut off," says the woman between tears.
“I never get tired of giving thanks to God, because I don't know how...”, she says without daring to finish the sentence, “it was very ugly”.
In front of her house, the hitmen left a high-end truck, like many, modified for combat, on fire.
"I had not experienced that here, I will never forget it."
After 10 hours of confrontation, when Guzmán had already been transferred to Mexico City, leaving behind a State under violent drug fire, the Army blocked the access to Jesús María.
No one leaves, no one enters, was the order.
The town had been completely destroyed, without electricity, water or telephone signal.
The residents were like this for two more days, until the Government sent a huge convoy to attend to them.
As in any other war scenario, they set up tents to distribute water, blankets and food.
The Red Cross helped those who had been hit by loose bullets and the forensic medical service removed the lifeless bodies of at least two people who had been thrown to one side.
The authorities took some unexploded grenades that were still in the drug trafficker's house, and began to remove one by one the dozens of destroyed cars that were in the place.
By the afternoon the Guzmán house had closed its doors, and the convoy broke camp to withdraw from Jesús María on time.
No foreigner wanted to be caught by night on that battlefield.
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