Valparaíso, Zacatecas: Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación Circa 2017

 "Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

The serious provocation to the Mexican Army in Valparaíso, Zacatecas, and the 19 bodies found in a clandestine grave bear witness to the worsening of the situation of violence.

The perverse rationale behind the ambush that resulted in the death of one military officer and the injuries of another, without knowing the motives, seems a typical operation of "warming up the plaza" aimed at complicating the dominance of the criminal group settled in the territory, a worrying fact seen in the stalking hypothesis to expand to Zacatecas of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, whose firepower exceeds what wasn’t known until now.

The worst mistake we can make is to continue without a local security policy to continue depending on what the high command of Mexico City has for us.

This comes from a long time ago

We have to recognize that Zacatecas is a territory of cultivation and drug trafficking on a large scale in an outstanding way since the eighties of the last century. It was during the administration of Cervantes Corona when the soldiers themselves were notoriously guarding the marijuana fields in Villa de Cos and other places, when a laboratory in the El Orito area was dismantled, smearing young people from well-known Zacatecan families.

These were the times of consolidation of local bosses such as Manuel Bracamontes, Antonio Pérez Parga and Ramiro Mireles for which history changed when the leaders of the then well-known Guadalajara cartel fell from grace as a result of the death of the DEA agent, Enrique Camarena, that led to the death or capture of a generation of capos, including Rafael Caro Quintero, owner of the Villa de Cos plaza.

In the eighties, the infiltration of the narco traffickers in the Army was so evident that the entire battalion itself had to be changed when the situation became unsupportable.

In the nineties, during the mandate of Romo Gutiérrez, the federal civil authorities operating in Zacatecas were seriously penetrated by organized crime, which reached international dimensions as revealed by the Colombian plane that landed with 12 tons of cocaine in Sombrerete. And that in the transfer of the merchandise to Zacatecas was reduced to a ton and a half, shortly after the violent deaths of various federal police chiefs involved in the operation, this was in the "golden age" of the still remembered and feared chief of the state ministerial police, Pedro Eliel Carmona.

In those years, it was common to find fearsome criminals in the now defunct Caballo Loco restaurant, with narco ballads made in their honor and everything that came with it, with senior officials from the PGR delegation who ended up murdered in other parts, stands out as testimony of the putrefaction of the civil authorities responsible for persecuting the drug trafficking, the strange suicide of the Federal Judicial Police delegate who, according to the official version, when he found out that he had arrived in Zacatecas preferred to go to La Bufa and commit suicide by means of a bullet with a very strange trajectory indeed.

The transit of the drugs through Zacatecas left an early mark through the murder at close range, at the El Pilar gas station, of the captain of Caminos Díaz Durán, a Fresnillo resident, and a lieutenant of Tamaulipas origin.

The fly by night smuggling filled the jail of "Cieneguillas" with beautiful women when it became fashionable to seduce them and then employ them to drive luxury cars with tires loaded with marijuana, cocaine and wads of cash.

Nor did we understand

With so many antecedents, no government had the vision to develop police for greater challenges, nor did it cultivate the promotion of crime investigation nor did it take steps to prevent the prison system from becoming a school of crime. For this reason when Felipe Calderón resorted to the criminal irresponsibility of catching the Zacatecanos by “smacking the hornet's nest” it caught us off guard.  And after ten years we continue to smack blindly at the pace set by an inept federal government.

 A local policy must start from a reality: the victory of Zacatecas will be viable only as part of the national victory over organized crime.

We can, of course, reduce the local production of criminals through a truly inclusive social policy that would greatly alleviate our anguish, but organized crime has an obligatory step in Zacatecas, propitious land for crops and places to hide laboratories, all circumstances that ensure the presence of foreign miscreants as long as they exist.

The poor are killing the poor

In Valparaíso, one more poor soldier found death, who came from Oaxaca to die at the hands of other poor men who wield weapons from the opposite side of the sidewalk.

One and the other, unknowingly, victims of the same greedy and corrupt elites.

Some as well as others crushed by the neo-liberal fantasy...and they’re aware of this.

Source: Imagen Zacatecas