Video: Outnumbered Police Let Armed Men Flee After Bar Shooting in Culiacán, Sinaloa

"Socalj" for Borderland Beat

After a young man was shot inside of the Casanova bar in Culiacán, users on social networks shared videos showing that Sinaloa police officers intercepted heavily armed subjects, but let them go.

According to local reports, these are agents of the Ministry of Public Security and Municipal Traffic. One of the recordings shows that the uniformed men ask for weapons to be lowered, but the subjects ignored them and board a pair of vehicles and flee easily, without being pursued. An officer was apparently talking to the driver while his colleagues were watching.

In another video it is observed that the armed men yell at the policemen and they also leave despite the presence of four agents, carrying their rifles without any concern in full view of all.

The confrontation took place in the vicinity of the Casanova bar where a young man was shot at early in the morning after a fight, as reported earlier by the Ministry of Public Security. Cristóbal Castañeda Camarillo, Secretary of Public Security of Sinaloa, detailed in a press conference how the events occurred at dawn on Friday in Culiacán.

The head of the Sinaloa SSP confirmed that the elements that intercepted heavily armed subjects and let them go were State and Municipal officials. He even detailed that the motorcycle officers seen in one of the videos are from the Centellas group of the State Preventive Police. The armed men who appear in the images, he explained, are possibly the ones who shot at the bar, leaving a person who was injured. He specified that state agents intercepted one of the vehicles because they began to do donuts in their cars at the corner of Enrique Sánchez Alonso and Diego Valadez.

The secretary explained that the state troops were outnumbered - there were five vehicles with armed people and the four policemen were on motorcycles - so they proceeded to press their panic buttons to request reinforcements. There were also several innocent people passing through. Subsequently, they began a persecution against the people who allegedly participated in the conflict in a bar in Culiacán over the weekend.

Likewise, he accused the Municipal Police of omission by pointing out that where state officials faced armed civilians there was a patrol of municipal troops and two officers on motorcycles who should have supported the state elements in the persecution, but nevertheless did not.

Mayor Estrada Ferreiro admitted that more security was needed and that any bar where violent events such as those on the boardwalk in the Tres Ríos sector occurred would be closed. The Ministry of Public Security has not established an official position on the agents who allowed armed civilians to flee in the vicinity of the bar.

Sinaloa is known as the cradle state of the most dangerous drug lords. Analysts indicate that a pax narca prevails in which low crime rates are maintained in exchange for not allowing the presence of security forces that obstruct operations of the cartel. The entity, unlike Guanajuato or Zacatecas, goes largely unnoticed in events of constant violence because it is dominated by a group and the balance of the dispute is not reflected in multi-homicides in each attack. Despite these two factors, Sinaloa does not stop registering violent events every day. 

Vehicle thefts, drug seizures, confrontations with authorities, disappearances, murders, or kidnappings are not something extraordinary in the state. Culiacán is among the municipalities with the highest crime rates in the country. The children of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, the so-called Chapitos, dominate there.

In October 2019, they demonstrated their ability to subdue the State, when federal agents arrested Ovidio Guzmán López, but hitmen from the criminal group unleashed chaos, freed prisoners, clashed with security forces, burned vehicles, and threatened to assassinate the military. together with their families. Finally, the son of Chapo Guzmán was released after the decision of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Source: Infobae