Schools and some businesses were closed and few people walked the streets of a city south of the Mexican capital on Tuesday, hours after five people were gunned down on the same street where another attack left eight dead just eight months earlier.
Huitzilac is at the center of a hotbed in the state of Morelos with competing criminal gangs and illegal logging. Apparently those who were killed were campaigning for local positions managing the common resources of the community, such as the surrounding forest, ahead of an election scheduled for March.
On Monday afternoon, just like every evening for the past few weeks, there were four men and one woman from one of the groups competing in the local elections to manage common land and forest. 'walk from door to door campaigning. They were captured by gunmen in two vehicles and left for dead on the main street of Huitzilac.
“I told them years ago not to get involved, there are always problems,” said Blanca Delgadillo, whose son-in-law José Cuevas, a farmer, was among those killed.
Delgadillo, 70, said violence had overtaken the agricultural community in recent years, forcing its 20,000 residents to live in fear.
Fernando Llano / AP
Mayor César Dávila Díaz, who took office on January 1, condemned the attack post on social mediasaying that such incidents “affect our city because they have always marked us as a hot spot” for violence.
The mayor denied the presence of drug cartels, dismissed the possibility of a political motive and said he did not know what the motive was.
On Tuesday morning, traces of blood and five candles could be seen on the pavement.
Two hundred members of the National Guard were coming to support local and state police who were patrolling the area.
José Romero, a 53-year-old farmer, who lives just feet from where the attack happened, said he was watching television when he heard the gunshots.
He said that the city's security is up and down depending on the presence of security forces. When the National Guard is not present, these attacks happen, said Romero.
An attack last May targeted men drinking beer after a soccer match, just two weeks before Mexico's presidential election. Four people died at the scene and four others died after being taken to hospital, the The Morelos prosecutor's office said at the time.
President Claudia Sheinbaum, who won that election handily, took over a complicated security situation. On Friday, Sheinbaum launched a campaign to overcome the number of weapons on the streets of the country with offers money for guns.
Dozens of criminal groups fight for territory throughout Mexico, trying to ensure safe routes to smuggle migrants, drugs and guns, but also increasingly to pull out communities.
Her administration has shown more willingness to go after criminal gangs than that of her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, but the hotspots stretch across the country. The words of The poster of Sinaloa has been fighting in the Sinaloa state capital for months.
The Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco new generation cartels are fighting in several states ranging from central Michoacán to the southern state of Chiapas along the Guatemalan border.
On Tuesday, body parts from an unknown number of victims were found on a highway in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco, as the state's governor announced that 180 soldiers had been deployed to deal with the violence. which was increasing. Earlier this month, a shooting at a bar in Tabasco seven people were left dead and five wounded.
Tabasco, home to oil production facilities, has seen an increase in violent crime in recent months. In December, seven prisoners were killed in a prison riot in Tabasco. The previous month, six people were killed and 10 were injured in another armed attack on a bar in the state.
