The Celaya police, persecuted by crime: “It is a war against a guerrilla army”

Someone has left a red cross on this dusty corner, next to the asphalt.

It's bright red, it looks like it's been freshly painted.

No flowers, no message.

Just the cross.

Policeman Javier illuminates it, silently, with his flashlight.

It's night.

Some wind is blowing.

“There was one of them,” he says.

The others, he adds, tried to flee along a dirt road that leaves the highway and enters the streets of Pelavacas, one of the communities of Celaya.

Javier walks through it now.

He illuminates here and there, idle.

He's not looking for anything in particular.

It's just something to do as the night goes on.

The fallen man and the others are part of the group of criminals who fought with municipal police on February 1, in Pelavacas.

Three of them died, as did two police officers.

It was the last attack against members of the corporation in a very long list.

Then there were more.

In the last calendar year, at least 22 police officers in Celaya, one of the most important cities in Guanajuato, in central Mexico, have been murdered.

There is no similar situation in any other city in the country, no war as evident as what is being experienced here.

The question is why.

Why in Celaya yes and in León, Irapuato or Salamanca, no.

Or not with that fixation.

Guanajuato has been suffering for years from a crisis of brutal violence, with thousands of murders, disappearances, massacres... In December alone, Celaya and its metropolitan area recorded two of the worst massacres in recent times, the murder of 11 young people at a party , and that of six others, days before, who were found shot next to the university.

Criminal groups have used aggressive tactics to avoid authority, such as blocking roads with burning cars or throwing pointed irons on the asphalt.

But Celaya is different: it is not about evasion, but about elimination.

A patrol makes a night tour of Celaya (State of Guanajuato), on March 7. Mónica González Islas

Criminals have attacked police officers here while they are working and on days off.

They have done it in groups and when they go alone.

With shots and grenades.

They have not cared that they are with their families, like the agent who was shot to death along with her daughter last month, one morning on the way to school.

It has also happened by chance—coincidences of a war context—like that February 1 in Pelavacas.

The agents were patrolling their area when they came across a truck that seemed suspicious to them.

They began to follow her and, in the pursuit, ended up ambushed.

“It was around one in the afternoon,” explains Javier, a fictitious name he has chosen for safety.

“There were four companions in the patrol, two in the cabin and two in the tower,” he explains.

“Those in the tower carried rifles and stood on the punt,” Javier continues.

“During the chase, they didn't realize it, but at least two of them got out of the car and took cover here,” he says, pointing to the red cross and a nearby tree.

The criminals were preparing their ambush.

They waited just a few seconds and, when the patrol arrived, they started shooting.

“They hit the pilot of the patrol car, who crashed into a light pole.

The co-pilot got out and tried to take refuge in the back, but he was hit during the changeover,” the agent continues.

The two police officers from the tower came down with their rifles and chased the hitmen.

At some point they gave the red cross to the one who was where he now lies.

Meters later, they reached two more, who were wounded and would die later.

The rest of the criminal gang drove their truck to the end of the road.

Then they abandoned her and ran away.

At the end of the road, above the dusty ground, small hills of glass complete the story of police Javier tonight.

They are the pieces of glass from the windows of the attackers' truck.

A companion of Javier, robust as the trunk of a willow, illuminates the surrounding fields, the warehouse that lies next to the windows.

He says that, now, the municipal police of Celaya no longer go out patrol by patrol.

They always go two by two.

“Really, it's war here, a war against an expert guerrilla army,” he murmurs, as if he wasn't saying anything important.

Municipal police officers tour the Pelavacas neighborhood. Mónica González Islas

Santa Rosa

On the outskirts of Celaya, in an unmarked property, the local Big Brother operates, the control center of the public network of security cameras, also known as C-4.

Jesús Rivera, the city's police chief since October 2021, says that currently, around 1,500 cameras monitor the streets of the municipality, which has around half a million inhabitants.

“It's one of the changes we've made here,” he defends.

“We did not have coordination between analysis, planning and operation on the street.

And now we direct and improve the operation from here,” he adds.

Former federal police officer, career agent, Rivera graduated in the mid-1990s and witnessed all the changes that successive governments of Mexico implemented in the corporation, from the Federal Highway Police, to the preventive, then to the federal plain. and, finally, the National Guard, the invention of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

In 2021, she asked for a leave of absence and came to Celaya, which she knew from his last mission in the federal agency, when he coordinated the corporation in Guanajuato.

Talk a lot, Rivera.

Her ideas fall out of her pockets.

And he repeats one, like his mantra: “Security is not an ideological issue, but a technical one.”

The chief points out a reason why what happens here happens, why his police officers, many former federal officers like him—70% of around 1,000, he says—suffer from the onslaught of crime.

“Celaya is the origin of the local criminal group.

From here they feed financially: theft of vehicles, banks, cargo, drugs, everything,” he explains.

“And we have weakened them substantially,” he adds.

Rivera does not say his name, but refers to the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, a regional criminal organization, nourished by the heat of fuel theft, the famous huachicol.

Rivera talks about important arrests, reprisals, confiscations...

The almost twenty years that the country has lived at the mercy of wars against crime show that reality is usually more complex.

In Mexico, organized crime exists at the mercy of its relationship with the authorities, changing in its hierarchy, fluidity and direction.

Rivera himself points out that since he arrived, at least 300 agents have left the corporation, half of them forced by him and his team, due to alleged corruption.

“We had many corruption problems and we are not exempt from them: leaks, omissions, improper actions,” he laments.

The results support part of his hypothesis.

The National Institute of Statistics shows an extraordinary decrease in murders in the city from 2021 to 2022, around 1,000.

Although the institute has not provided data for 2023, the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System, which shares its statistics more quickly, shows a new decrease in Guanajuato for last year.

Rivera also points out that, since 2021, vehicle theft has decreased by almost 90% and bank robberies have ended.

The Celaya Citizen Observatory points out, however, that extortion and business robbery continues to be very high.

Jesús Rivera, secretary of security of Celaya, at the municipal C4 facilities. Mónica González Islas

From outside

“There have been weeks when it was one attack per day,” says agent Sofía, next to the C-4 operation screens.

And he is right.

With the Pelavacas case, January and February have been especially painful.

In just two months, 10 agents have been murdered.

Sofía, her fictitious name, remembers the case of January 25, when criminals ambushed and murdered four agents in one fell swoop, not far from here, in Rincón Tamayo, the largest community in the south of the city.

“The teammates asked for support on the radio once, but they didn't talk anymore.

There we knew which operational cell they belonged to, but not who they were or where they were.”

From the operation module in which Sofía dispatches, the agents in charge that day took four minutes to locate the ambushed patrol: it was the only one of all those in Celaya that had stopped moving.

Shortly after, other patrols arrived and saw that of their companions, crashed.

They had all died.

The attack is understood as the peak of a long-standing battle.

Chief Rivera dates the start of hostilities to the end of 2022. Not that things had been calm before.

In August, criminals had murdered the mayor's son in the city, when he was leaving a pharmacy.

Many in Celaya understood that as a crime challenge.

Rivera prefers not to say if the attack had to do with his work.

He doesn't rule it out either.

But in November, things changed.

In the same place where four police officers were killed 14 months later, Rincón Tamayo, criminals ambushed a group of agents who had stopped to have coffee early in the morning.

At least one died.

“That same day,” says Rivera, “they manifest alliances with other groups on social networks.”

The chief refers to an alleged agreement between those from Santa Rosa de Lima, with the Escorpión group of the Gulf Cartel, which operates in Matamoros (Tamaulipas).

The Command, Control, Communications and Computing Center (C4) of Celaya. Mónica González Islas

A week later, criminals attacked one of the three municipal police stations, just on the other side of the city, in the most important community in the north, San Juan de la Vega.

“Their trucks arrived with armed people, attacking... Four of our people fell, wounded, they burned any number of trucks.

But there we neutralized one of the leaders of the Scorpions,” he explains.

The alliance of the local group with other foreigners, or the hiring of foreign mercenaries, has ceased to surprise in Celaya, a situation parallel to that experienced by other states in the country, such as Michoacán.

Here it hasn't just been those from the Scorpion group.

The agents have also detected the presence of former Colombian soldiers.

For Chief Rivera, the way forward is to improve collaboration with surrounding municipalities.

In the end, his agents work as far as the city ends.

Of the eight towns that make up the metropolitan area, Celaya maintains closeness in security issues with two.

During the night tour with the police, Javier and other colleagues talk about the Colombians' case.

The agent as large as a willow trunk says that “Colombian paramilitaries, lancers and explosives have come here,” and remembers the car bomb that exploded last year in the city, injuring nine national guardsmen and killing one.

The police officer does not know if that car had been prepared with them in mind or not.

The criminals reported the car and the Guard arrived first.

Next to the little glass mountains, at the end of the dirt road, he, Javier and two others remember that in the Pelavacas case there were also people from Colombia involved.

“After the attack, looking at the C-4 cameras, we arrived at a house in a subdivision near here and found uniforms and so on,” says Javier.

“They had come to change there.

And the uniforms were like combat ones, with Velcro to put their names on.

And on the labels it said 'made in Colombia', ditch.

An agent of the Celaya Citizen Security Secretariat (SSCC). Mónica González Islas

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