A wave of violence terrorizes Mexico as criminals kill with impunity

Five medical students were found dead in a vehicle, their bodies showing signs of torture.

Four bystanders shot dead by gunmen who shot at a hair salon.

Eleven young people shot by criminals who shot up a Christmas party.

The recent attacks – all in the past month – are the latest in a series of mass killings in Mexico that have drawn renewed attention to the government’s struggle to control the violence raging across the country.

“Wherever you look, there is a cousin, a brother, a friend dead,” said Angélica Zamudio Almanza, whose cousin was killed Sunday in the holiday party shooting in Guanajuato, one of Mexico’s most violent states.

She was, she said, “between fear, helplessness and anger.”

In the run-up to Mexico’s crucial presidential elections next summer, violence has become perhaps the most important political issue in the country. opinion polls show Insecurity is the top concern of the population and the ruling party is under pressure to make progress in its fight against the increasingly powerful drug cartels.

Preliminary research provides few clues as to whether a new dynamic in the criminal underworld is behind the recent wave of mass killings. What is clear, analysts say, is that they are all driven by one constant that no Mexican leader has touched: near-total impunity for criminals.

Less than 4 percent of criminal investigations in Mexico are ever solved studies showand in 2022, approximately 92 percent of crimes went unreported.

“The criminals feel emboldened because they know there is virtually no chance of any punishment,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexico City-based security consultant. “They know they can do whatever they want, that’s the common denominator.”

The dominance of the cartels has also become a focus for US officials, with Republicans threatening to invade Mexico to combat the criminal groups and concern growing in Washington that criminal groups’ attacks on communities are contributing to the tidal wave of migration at the southern border .

“If you see a deficit in the security services’ ability to protect civilians, if it’s not just cartel-on-cartel violence, then that should be of concern to the United States,” said Roberta Jacobson, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico. “No. 1, probably for this government, because it will encourage migration as people become displaced.”

According to U.S. government figures, an extraordinary number of Mexican families — nearly 160,000 — were caught illegally crossing the southern border between October 2022 and September, four times the number in the previous year. The influx, migration experts say, was fueled in part by cartels driving people from their homes under threats of recruitment, extortion or death.

Mexicans’ resentment of their criminal overlords has reached a boiling point in some parts of the country.

This month, farmers in central Mexico unleashed their anger on gang members who tried to extort them. They used machetes and guns to chase down and kill 10 suspected members of a local cell of the Michoacán Family cartel, officials said.

Some on social media celebrated the incident, which was partly captured on video, as a triumph of ordinary citizens over their tormentors in the face of an absent government.

But the uprising came at a cost.

Although President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has sent hundreds of soldiers to the area, he says the vengeful cartel has driven more than 100 families to flee their homes. local news media reports.

Mr López Obrador came to power in 2018 promising to overhaul the country’s approach to crime, focusing on tackling the poverty that drives young people to join gangs, rather than aggressively confronting the cartels on the streets .

The strategy, which Mr. López Obrador called “hugs, not bullets,” has had some success, analysts say. Over the past five years, homicide rates have fallen modestly, and surveys show that people in cities feel safer than under the previous president.

“They left us with a high murder rate,” Mr. López Obrador said this month, referring to his predecessors. “But we brought them down and they will continue to come down.”

Yet reports of extortion and missing persons have skyrocketed since 2018, and homicides remain close to their highest recorded levels.

The president has also stoked anger by suggesting, without providing evidence, that those killed in high-profile attacks were somehow involved with drugs themselves.

Three days after the medical students were found dead in the city of Celaya, Guanajuato state, Mr. López Obrador said at his regular nationally televised press conference that the young men were killed “because they went to buy from someone who sold drugs in an area that belonged to another gang.”

Local officials later said the investigation found the crime had nothing to do with drug sales, and Fabiola Mateos Chavolla, the mother of two of the victims, lashed out at the president for his “cruel and irresponsible comments” about her sons, saying Mr. López Obrador had “blamed them for their deaths.”

This week, days after the attack on the holiday party, the president again pointed to “drug use” as an explanation.

Ms. Zamudio Almanza, whose cousin, Galileo Almanza Lezama, 26, was shot during the attack, was angered by Mr. López Obrador’s comment.

“Faced with his own incompetence, he has no choice but to revictimize people,” she said of the president.

The victims of the recent outbreaks of violence died for various reasons, preliminary research shows: the medical students crossed paths with criminals at a water park; the bystanders at the hair salon were in the wrong place at the wrong time; the partygoers insulted young men who were prepared to slaughter them in revenge.

The wife of Juan Luis García Espitia, a sound engineer who was killed Saturday while working for the band that played at the holiday party in Salvatierra, Guanajuato, said she wanted her husband’s killers punished.

“I don’t know how to tell my daughters when I don’t even have the words,” said the mother of three, who asked to give only her first name, Jazmín, for fear of reprisals. “I don’t know how to explain to them that their father will be gone.”

She added: “I can’t get my husband back, but I want justice.”

Miguel Díaz Lemus contributed reporting from Salvatierra, Guanajuato.