A drug cartel kills 20 people in Mexico

Authorities of the Mexican state of Michoacán (west) They identified the Los Correa Cartel as responsible for the murder of 20 people., in an attack perpetrated on Sunday night in a clandestine rooster arena in the municipality of Zinapécuaro. Carlos Torres Piña, Secretary of the Government of Michoacán (second in line behind Governor Alfredo Ramírez), reported that cockfights were being held in the palenque without authorization from the Zinapécuaro city council, a municipality bordering the state of Guanajuato. The official, at the express question of EFE, specified that the drug trafficking organization calling itself the Los Correa Cartel burst into the place to attack an alleged leader and assassins of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). “At the scene of the events, apparently, there was a leader of a criminal organization, which has been widely reported to be from Jalisco. (The Correas) are the ones who control another area (eastern Michoacán) and are the ones who They entered there,” he said.

The State Attorney General’s Office (FGE) reported that the clandestine palenque was enabled within the ‘El Paraíso’ ranch, located on the federal highway Zinapécuaro-Acámbaro (Guanajuato), where 15 vehicles related to the attack were secured. In his morning press conference, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged that the massacre had been caused by the clash of rival criminal groups. In the region, these groups fight over the control of illicit activities such as the production and trafficking of methamphetamine, extortion and kidnapping.

increasing violence

This massacre is added to various violent acts that have placed Michoacán as one of the states with high levels of murdersrelated to organized crime. On March 10, alleged gunmen from the CJNG and the La Nueva Familia Michoacana Cartel clashed with gunshots in the municipality of San Juan Nuevo Parangaricutiro, in the Purépecha indigenous region of Michoacán, where five men were shot to death. That day the army arrested 32 CJNG gunmen who broke into and barricaded themselves in the city hall building.

Previously, on February 27, an armed commando assassinated several people in the town of San José de Gracia, a municipality in Marcos Castellanos in Michoacan, bordering the state of Jalisco. The assassins took and hid the bodies, so the exact number of victims is unknown, although the State Prosecutor’s Office discovered genetic profiles of 11 people in traces of blood.

On February 7, Enrique Velázquez Orozco, mayor of the municipality of Contepec -adjacent to the states of Mexico and Querétaro-, was kidnapped and shot to death. Almost a month later, on March 10, César Arturo Valencia Caballero, mayor of Aguililla, in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, was shot dead while driving a city hall vehicle. A day later, the bullet-ridden body of René Cervantes, Valencia Caballero’s main adviser, was discovered.

The violence in the region also reached the press. Journalist Armando Linares, director of the news portal Monitor Michoacán -based in the municipality of Zitácuaro-, was shot dead on March 15, while on January 31 hitmen killed Roberto Toledo, a collaborator of that same news outlet. communication. In addition, on November 1, 2021, 11 Purépecha indigenous people were shot to death in the municipality of Tangamandapio, when they were collecting honey as part of the ancestral tradition of the Night of the Dead.

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Information from the intelligence areas of the Federal and State governments, to which Efe had access, specifies that At least a dozen drug cartels operate in Michoacán, whose assassins maintain control of drug production and trafficking in the regions of Tierra Caliente, Oriente, Sierra-Costa and Bajío. These criminal organizations call themselves Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), La Nueva Familia Michoacana, Los Caballeros Templarios (CT), Cartel de Zicuirán, La Familia Michoacana (former cartel and base of Los Caballeros Templarios), Cartel del Golfo, Cartel de Los Correa, Los Reyes Cartel, Tepalcatepec Cartel and Pueblos Unidos.

So far this year, there have been several massacres in Michoacán as a result of clashes between organized crime groups. According to official data, in the first two months of the year this state accumulates 484 intentional homicides. Mexico registered 33,308 homicides in 2021 after the two most violent years in its history, under the mandate of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with 34,690 murder victims in 2019 and 34,554 in 2020.