AP.– Followed by vehicles with heavily armed soldiers, four coffins floated above a sea of hundreds of mourners.
Neighbors peered nervously from their homes as crowds made their way past closed businesses, empty streets and political campaign signs covering the small town of Huitzilac.
Days earlier, gunmen in two cars sprayed bullets into a nearby store, claiming the lives of eight men who locals said were drinking beers after a soccer game. Now fear takes over the daily lives of the residents, who say that the town is involuntarily immersed in a crossfire between rival mafias.
The growing number of criminal groups in Mexico see the June 2 elections as an opportunity to seize power, which is why they have killed more than 100 people for political reasons, including twenty candidates this year, and are fighting territories, terrorizing local communities like Huitzilac.
“Violence is always there, but there have never been as many deaths as now. One day they kill two, the next they kill another,” said Anahí, a 42-year-old mother, on Tuesday, who did not reveal her full name for fear of being attacked. “When my phone rings, sometimes I’m so scared that she’s from school and they’re going to tell me something happened with my kids.”
Cartel violence is nothing new in Mexico, but bloodshed in the country has spiked ahead of elections, with April being the deadliest month this year, according to government data.
But the candidates are not the only ones at risk. Even before the election, it was clear that outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had promised to ease the cartel war, had done little more than stabilize the high level of violence in Mexico.
Despite dissolving a corrupt Federal Police and replacing it with a 130,000-strong National Guard, and focusing on addressing social problems that favor recruitment by cartels, murders in April reached almost the same historical maximum as when López Obrador He took office in 2018.
In many cases, authorities have refused to pursue cartel leaders, who have expanded their control over much of the country and multiplied their profits, not only from drugs, but also from legal business sectors. and migrant trafficking. They have also fought with more sophisticated tools, such as bomb-dropping drones and improvised explosive devices.
So far, the presidential candidates have only offered proposals that amount to more of the same.
“Criminal violence has become much more difficult to resolve today than it was six years ago… You cannot expect a quick solution to the situation; it’s too entrenched,” said Falko Ernst, senior Mexico analyst at the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group focused on war prevention. “Now it is going to be even more difficult to undo” than when López Obrador came to power.
Saturday’s massacre in Huitzilac occurred after waves of other attacks, according to local media and residents. In just the last few weeks, local media reported that three people were murdered on the road leading out of the town, another three were shot in front of a restaurant in a neighboring municipality and, in the nearby tourist city of Cuernavaca, criminals reportedly killed a patient in a private hospital.
Josué Meza Cuevas, Huitzilac’s municipal general secretary, said it was unclear what caused the bloodshed, but many in the town attribute it to a turf war between the Familia Michoacana, La Unión de Morelos and other cartels, which has made the Morelos state, one of the most violent in Mexico.
On Tuesday Huitzilac fell into a disturbing silence, the shops closed and few dared to go out into the streets. Schools suspended classes until further notice in response to requests from fearful parents.
Anahí, a resident of Huitzilac for years, and her teenage children were one of the many families who took refuge in her houses, too scared to go outside.
Although Cuevas said that “she has never had anything like this happen,” Anahí indicated that she had been feeling like death was breathing down her neck for a long time.
Located just over an hour from Mexico City’s trendy bars and backpacker hostels, Huitzilac has a reputation as a town outside the reach of the law.
Source: latin.us
