Guanajuato, is the most violent state in Mexico as El Mencho and El Marro war

Chivis Martinez  Borderland Beat  TY GUS RioDoce

First place in malicious homicides and second in feminicides

The state of Guanajuato suffers as never before, the effects of the displacements of criminal groups such as the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel and its confrontation with local cartels such as Santa Rosa de Lima, which for years had dominated the criminal networks of drug trafficking, drug trafficking and fuel stolen from the pipelines that cross the state and from the refinery “Ing. Antonio M. Amor” in Salamanca, all, illicit millionaire businesses.

Neither the repeated warnings and promises of the current PAN governor, Diego Sinhue Rodríguez Vallejo, nor the experienced profiles of the head of the State Public Security Secretariat, the State Attorney General's Office or the police directors of the industrial corridor municipalities that concentrate to the greater number of inhabitants, they have prevented Guanajuato from occupying the first place nationally in the number of malicious homicides: 2 thousand 865 from January to October.

At the bottom of that number there are dozens of circumstantial victims and very young population hit by bullets. The Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP) revealed in its statistics as of October that 105 minors are among the victims of the murders committed this year in the state.

These minors have lost their lives by participating in criminal activities authorized as gunmen or drug dealers, or as victims in the incursions of armed groups in private homes or in cross-fire in the streets.

Bullets, in effect, have been the growing cause of these crimes. More than 84 percent of the malicious killings from January to October were committed using firearms.

On November 25, International Day for the Eradication of Violence Against Women, the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (INEGI) published preliminary data on homicidal violence against women in the country, which places the state in the second place of malicious murders, with 239, after the State of Mexico, where 272 were killed.

It is in the State of Mexico and Guanajuato, along with Jalisco, Baja California and Chihuahua where more than 53 percent of the homicides of women were concentrated in that period of this year.

The attraction of companies from various sectors throughout the industrial corridor and an alleged armor of the Guanajuato territory with state-of-the-art technology for which more than 2 billion pesos (Escudo Project) were paid in cameras, radios, road arches and computer facilities and command, allowed the PAN governors until the six-year term of Juan Manuel Oliva Ramírez (2006-2012) to presume a state with a growing and secure economy.

But in the second half of the following sexennium, that of Miguel Márquez Márquez, that image was shattered.

In the last years of Márquez's mandate, the incessant illicit exploitation of hydrocarbons from the Pemex pipelines and the refinery in Salamanca was discovered, although this activity had actually started since many years ago, as recorded in the investigations published by the journalist Ana Lilia Pérez in her books Pemex RIP, Blue Shirts, Black Hands and The Black Cartel , in which she documented that it was precisely in the Salamanca refinery where the fuel produced by the parastatal began to be stolen.

A local criminal group set their reals for at least a decade and turned the huachicoleo (as the stolen fuel transfer known) into its main source of income, the so-called Santa Rosa Cartel in Lima, led by a former police officer, José Antonio Yépez Ortiz.

But the entity also did not avoid the increase in drug use and therefore, the multiplication of drug trafficking, especially the drug known as "crystal", whose consumption quintupled in a few years.

An analysis of the Mexico Social organization made by the sociologist Saúl Arellano with data from INEGI, refers to how criminal violence grew exponentially, particularly since 2015.

Paradoxically, a year earlier, the then governor Miguel Márquez had inaugurated the “Shield” surveillance system acquired in more than 2 billion pesos - for which a loan was acquired - which soon proved ineffective in the tasks to inhibit, detect and stop the incursion of the emissaries of the Jalisco Cartel or the criminal operations of the La Unión group - a criminal group based mainly in León - or that of Santa Rosa.

Thus, even in 2013, Guanajuato was not among the states with the highest rates of malicious homicides or other high-impact crimes. That year, while the State of Mexico registered 3,131 malicious homicides (according to INEGI) in Guanajuato, 701 were committed.

But by 2017, Guanajuato was in the third national place of that crime, with 2,241 homicides, while 3,072 were registered in the State of Mexico.

In the case of Guanajuato, the figure had increased by 219 percent in just four years, to be above Tamaulipas or Guerrero, which until before that year appeared in the first places of that statistic.

“In 2018 the historic change took place: Guanajuato closed the year with an unusual figure of 3 thousand 412 homicides; the State of Mexico in second place with 3 thousand 134 cases; Baja California also surprised by placing in third place, with 2,855 malicious homicides; Jalisco rose to fourth place; and Guerrero and Chihuahua descended to fifth and sixth positions, respectively,”says the analysis of the Mexico Social organization.

In September 2018, at the end of Márquez's mandate - which before leaving he acknowledged having left the debt of insecurity - his successor, Diego Sinhue Rodríguez, also of the PAN, ratified the head of the Ministry of Public Security, Álvar Cabeza de Vaca and then Attorney General Carlos Zamarripa Aguirre, who in February 2019 became the state attorney general for the next nine years, when he was almost 10 years as attorney.

The governor also promised that he would give priority to the recovery of the tranquility of Guanajuato.

But a little more than a year after his mandate, the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel has permeated an extensive part of the state territory with an overwhelming force and maintains a brutal fight against the most visible local criminal group, whose boss “El Marro”, has not  been captured,  even with using all security masures and deployments of the operation baptized as "Rudder Strike" with the Navy first, and now with the Army.

The balances have also reached members of various corporations, including municipal police officers - including several incumbents -, state ministerial agents, penitentiary custodians, federal police officers and recently, elements of the National Guard, which in June entered to patrol some areas from Guanajuato, particularly from the south and west.

At least 49 elements of these different corporations were killed up to  the beginning of November of this year; the municipalities that concentrated the majority of these murders - in ambushes, intercepted on roads, when they left or were going to their homes or in confrontations - are Celaya, Irapuato, León and Valle de Santiago.

In the latter municipality, five custodians of the Social Reintegration Center were ambushed and killed with dozens of shots to the truck in which they were traveling, a few kilometers from the penitentiary center, in September. A few months earlier, at the beginning of the year, the chief of these custodians was killed by a motorcyclist in the city of Guanajuato, when he was going to leave his son to school.

In 2018, the number reached 64, according to the organization Causa en Común.

Public officials, particularly from municipal governments, have also been victims of the wave of homicides. The councilors of Apaseo el Alto Francisco García, and Comonfort José Luis Saucillo, were killed at the end of September, one the next day.

On November 29, Abasolo Mauricio Guerrero's treasurer was tortured and killed.

The next day, on Saturday 30, the former municipal president of Cortázar, former PRD Hugo Estefanía Monroy, was also killed by a hitman who entered the office of his transport company where the former mayor was with his wife and two collaborators; The latter also died in the attack.

Estefanía had been revealed months ago, of  a phone call with an alleged member of the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel in which they talked about doing business from the public administration.

Before being killed, the former mayor worked on the creation of Progressive Social Networks in the state.