Violence Between CJNG And Cartel Sinaloa, Bleeds Zacatecas

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

The narco war between cartels in municipalities of Zacatecas, causes a profuse bloodshed. At least 62 police officers were killed from 2018 to date. Multihomicides are as frequent as unitary murders. Women and minors, in the middle of the battle between the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels. In two months, the bodies of 14 people were hung on vehicle bridges of the entity. INE trainer, photojournalist and indigenous rights defender, they were also victims of violence

The violent territorial battle between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and Cartel Sinaloa (CS) in Zacatecas is relentless, regardless of whether among the victims there are innocent people or people outside the conflict, such as women and children. The bloodshed has reached, from 2018 to date, 62 municipal and state police, in addition to an activist and a photojournalist.

The last horror scene was observed on Thursday, August 11, at dawn, on a vehicular bridge on State Highway 120, which goes from the Zacatecan Capital to the community of El Orito, where the bodies of six people were hung, two of whom fell when the rope used could not support the weight. During the last two months, Theresa el been 14 bodies abandoned on various bridges.

The shocks due to shootings, false police checkpoints, uprisings and clandestine graves are recorded in the city of Zacatecas as in Fresnillo, Pánuco, Sain Alto, Calera Río Grande or Tepetongo, in the center of the State. In the municipalities of Juan Aldama or Sombrerete, on the borders with the State of Durango. Valparaíso or Nochistlán on the border with Jalisco; or Villa de Cos, Guadalupe, Ojocaliente, Trancoso or Pinos, in the neighborhood of the San Luis Potosí state

Elements of the Investigative Police found human remains on Wednesday in a property in the municipality of Villa de Cos, Zacatecas.

In 2021, Zacatecas occupies the dishonorable first place that Colima and Guanajuato previously had with the highest homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants, according to official criminal indicators. The discovery of people shot dead, strangled, beheaded or incinerated is frequent. Tied hand and foot, in unpopulated areas, wrapped in blankets or left inside vehicles, are the modes of organized crime. The biggest massacres have occurred during clashes between drug trafficking groups or against police.

Since the beginning of July, the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reported that in some states the homicide rate decreased despite the existence of drug cartels, but he acknowledged that this happens because there was hegemony of some criminal group and therefore they are not fighting; however, he recognized that in cases where shootings are recorded -as in Zacatecas-, there are clashes between groups, a situation that he qualified as a legacy of previous administrations.

Another phenomenon that occurs in that state is the location of narco-pits in at least five municipalities in the last two years. On May 13, 2020, in Francisco R. Murguía, a grave with four corpses was found; another the following June 30 in Fresnillo, with three bodies; on July 2, another tomb with five people in Sombrete; and at the close of that year, on December 17, a pit with bones in Luis Moya. On January 23, 2021, three graves were reported in Villa de Cos with 18 bodies; and on April 10, a corpse in another false grave.

DEATH OF POLICE

After the Gulf Cartel lost the territories it had won in a war against Los Zetas, in Zacatecas, during the first five years of the previous decade, the appearance of the Sinaloa Cartel temporarily decreased conflicts by agreeing with the Tamaulipecos. However, the CJNG began its incursion into the mining entity along the borders of Guanajuato, Jalisco and Nayarit in 2018, achieving the withdrawal of those from the Gulf.

The brazenness of the Jalisco Cartel with vehicles labeled with its acronym and the dissemination of videos announcing its presence, lit the fuse for the conflagration with the Sinaloans. The dispute to control the favors and protection of the state and municipal police forces, has led to the death of 62 police officers. Nine of them in 2018; nine in 2019; 26 in 2020; and 18, so far in 2021.

Among the most remembered events, is the shooting of four uniformed personnel in Sombrerete on March 21, 2020, two were men and two women. Eight days later, three other policemen were killed in Nochistlán. On September 19 of that year, an armed criminal cell attacked the Public Security Command of the municipality of Juan Aldama, killing three officers, including the incumbent, Ricardo Barrón Guzmán, and another injured gendarme.

On September 12 of the same year, the alleged arrest of the head of the Anti-Kidnapping Unit of the Prosecutor's Office of Zacatecas, Gustavo Domínguez Saldívar, was announced while trying to cross the border between Matamoros, Tamaulipas and Brownsville, Texas. It was said that he had an arrest warrant for the crimes of illicit enrichment, criminal association and operations with resources of illicit origin. The former official, who also served as director of the Ministerial Police, was publicly denounced in 2018 through drug blankets of receiving money from drug trafficking. Their legal destiny was never known.

The death of police officers continued that year, and on October 25, four uniformed personnel were shot in the municipality of Pinos, Zacatecas. On December 12, in the municipality of Tepetongo, the mutilated and beheaded body of the director of the Municipal Police, Armando Cuevas Rocha, was found, along with a message signed by the CJNG.

This year, on March 12, four elements of the State Police were killed and burned after the attack of an armed group in Villa de Cos. On May 31, near the Municipal Public Security Police Station of Zacatecas, Deputy Director Juan Manuel de la Rosa Revilla was shot down, who was out in public while driving aboard a gray Chevy vehicle. And on June 23, two police officers, but from the neighboring state of San Luis Potosí, were found dead on the Arroyo de las Sirenas bridge in Zacatecas; both were reported missing.

Elements of the State Prosecutor's Office located a new clandestine grave located in the Los Sabinos Fraccionamiento, in the municipality of El Salto.

MASS CRIMES

In Zacatecas, multihomicides are as common as unitary murders. In 2020, the following are counted: March 21, five tortured people, dead on a dirt road in Fresnillo; June 15, five shot dead with traces of torture inside black bags, on the federal highway of Fresnillo; June 25, six alleged criminals killed during a confrontation in Juan Aldama.

On June 26 of that year, 14 bodies were found stacked on the banks of Federal Highway 45, in Fresnillo, near the community of Cerro Gordo, on the stretch that leads to Cañitas de Felipe Pescador. The victims had bullet wounds, were tied and wrapped in blankets with silver tape. Another four bodies were located in the community of Río Florido, municipality of Fresnillo; and another six in Juan Aldama.

On August 29, five bodies wrapped in blankets were found again in Fresnillo. On October 12, an armed criminal cell attacked elements of the State Preventive Police in the community of Río Frío, municipality of Calera, with three agents injured and 14 alleged criminals killed. As a result of the police action, three vehicles, eight long firearms, 23 7.62 and 223 caliber magazines were secured, in addition to drugs. The year closed with the location of five bodies with traces of torture, on October 31; and another five executed on December 16, both cases in Fresnillo.

So far in 2021, multi-homicides have been documented such as the one that occurred on January 18, when eight people were killed during the early hours of the morning in El Salto, Zacatecas, inside two homes. The hitmen who stormed the buildings, used firearms caliber .223 (AR-15), 9 millimeters and 7.62 (AK-47) to consummate the crimes, They also burned three houses.

On June 17, the rivalry between CS and CJNG led them to face each other in the Sierra Alta, on the borders of Zacatecas and Jalisco. It was a shooting that lasted eleven hours. The first clash occurred at 6:00 p.m. in the community of San Juan Capistrano, on the way to El Tulillo, municipality of Valparaíso, and continued to the vicinity of Huejuquilla El Alto, in Jalisco. It ended at 05:00 on Friday, the 18th, with the death toll of 18 people lying along the way, between roads and slopes.

WOMEN AND MINORS

In Zacatecas, the murders of women and minors are extremely cruel, viciously. Just take a look at the cases. In 2020, on February 18, the remains of three men and a woman were found next to a road in Sain Alto; on March 4, in a house under construction in Fresnillo, the body of a tortured woman was located; on May 2, in the same municipality, the semi-naked bodies of two tortured women and a man were found, with a narco-message on top; same date, but in Sain Alto, they find three women beheaded, also with a message.

On May 4, the decapitated body of a woman was found in Guadalupe, Zacatecas; on June 20, the body of another half-naked woman and a narcomessage are reported in Juan Aldama; on June 28, a woman was dismembered in retaliation for belonging to a rival criminal organization, in Zacatecas; on July 10, the bodies of three men and a woman, whose head was hanging from a scaffolding inside a home in Fresnillo, are located.

The list of events is long: on July 12, 2020, during an armed attack in Fresnillo, two men and two women were killed, including a pregnant woman and a minor; the next day, three women were executed in Luis Moya; on August 4, the bodies of a woman and four men are found in a well in Sain Alto; two days later, a mother and her two daughters are shot while traveling in a vehicle in Fresnillo; and on August 25, a 17-year-old boy was shot dead in Calera.

Also in Calera, but on September 8, a teenager was killed; on November 14, another teenager was killed by an armed group that entered his house in Pánuco; on October 25, in a bar in the Sierra de Jerez, a woman and three men were executed; on November 5, four minors were shot dead in Fresnillo; on October 22, a girl was tortured and murdered in Guadalupe and, on the same date, but in a house in Fresnillo, four men were executed, one of 13 years old. The year closed with the death of another minor in Fresnillo on December 12 and two underage women three days later, in Benito Juárez, Zacatecas.

On January 1, 2021, it began with the murder of a woman and two men in Vetagrande; on January 5, a minor was shot dead in the Zacatecan Capital; eight days later, on a vent of a mine in Fresnillo, the bodies of two women and four men are located; on January 19, a child was murdered in Guadalupe; and on January 31, three women and two men are reported to be found in Fresnillo.

On February 9, a 15-year-old boy was killed at his home in Fresnillo; on March 6, an armed group shot at three women and a man, who died in Fresnillo; on March 22, an adult and a minor were killed in Rio Grande. On April 6, armed men shot at people in the streets of downtown Jerez, killing a woman and two men; on the same day, they find two minors and a man killed in Fresnillo; and on July 23, two girls and their father were massacred in the same municipality.

OTHER CRIMES

In addition to the confrontations and homicides between members of organized crime, other types of murders occur in Zacatecas, such as the death of 16 inmates inside the Regional Center for Social Rehabilitation of Cieneguillas on January 1, 2020. The activist defending the Wirikuta territory, Paulina Gómez, was also found dead, in a malicious event, on March 22 of that year in El Salvador.

On December 9, photojournalist Jaime Daniel Castaño Zacarías was shot after covering the discovery of two bodies, on a road near the municipality of Jerez de García Salinas. Castaño stopped his vehicle on the Jerez-Fresnillo section of Federal Highway 23, near the town of San Juan. In that place were two bodies tied, tortured and shot to death, leaving a narco-message on them.

Other events that dismayed society occurred on February 19, 2021, when a trainer from the National Electoral Institute (INE) was killed in Fresnillo and on June 29 when the murder of a doctor and the driver of an ambulance who had carried out the transfer of a pregnant woman from a clinic in the Health Sector of Huejuquilla El Alto, Jalisco, to Fresnillo, Zacatecas. On the way they were intercepted by a checkpoint of criminals who forced them to identify themselves.

The paramedical driver and the young doctor Luis Fernando Montes de Oca, 25, a graduate of the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, managed to admit the woman in labor to a hospital, but when they returned to Jalisco -at night- and crossed Valparaíso they were chased and executed by hitmen, who still set fire to the ambulance that was transporting them. An atrocious crime that motivated the demonstration of young doctors in the Perla Tapatía.

Zeta Tijuana