The Remote Cartel Mines... Jalisco

"Char" for Borderland Beat 

By: Isaack de Loza

Jalisco is far from being an ordinary state. Those of us who live here have witnessed practically everything you could imagine when it comes to insecurity.

For the past six years, the birthplace of mariachi and charrería has been undermined by a terror that, as Governor Enrique Alfaro finally acknowledged, has paid off. Today, eight out of 10 Jalisco residents feel insecurity when they go out on the street, get on the bus, go to work or to the ATM, and even in their homes.

And no. It is not normal. And no. We must not allow this to become normal.

Nor can we reduce the impact of an aggression of this magnitude, regardless of the fact that years before (June and October 2008) there were grenade attacks against the state Public Security Secretariat, that an Army helicopter was shot down in May 2015, that personnel of the now defunct National Gendarmerie, the National Guard and even former governor Aristoteles Sandoval have been ambushed and killed.

The remote mines placed by the New Generation cartel in Tlajomulco had a clear intention: to instill terror among the population. But they also managed to worry the Jalisco government's security cabinet.

According to the ongoing dossier, the strongest link to this attack involves mass-produced weapons. That is to say, these are not devices built with wires, gunpowder and inventiveness. The ones that exploded in Tlajomulco were landmines that were activated at a distance and not when the units passed over them.

State and federal authorities are investigating the residue of these devices to determine their origin. They describe them as a "melon" which in military parlance are known as "Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)" or "booby traps".

This arises from the discovery, in February 2022, of more than 250 explosives that were unearthed from gaps, warehouses and abandoned houses in places like Aguililla, Tepalcatepec and Coalcomán. All of them were deactivated by special Army groups and were found after the death of a farmer who had the misfortune of crashing his pickaxe into one of them.

The official version maintains that the attack against the Prosecutor's Office was an ambush. According to Governor Enrique Alfaro, for three days authorities received anonymous calls informing that there were human remains in a new grave in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga.

The investigative police responded to the report and what happened next was covered by national and international news programs. Once again, Jalisco was in the news because crime managed to make the news.

But the other version, which is being studied as a latent possibility, is that the mines were placed to prevent the passage of convoys of rival groups. Because Tlajomulco, be it the cradle of any political project, remains a strategic, attractive and highly valuable terrain for organized crime.

The same organized crime that has blocked highways, set fire to trucks, attacked a former Secretary of Security in the middle of the pink zone of Guadalajara, murdered women and children whom it considers "collateral damage", and that thanks to its diversification of businesses enjoys an ever-increasing power.

The mines shook the first square of Tlajomulco, but its wave of expansion reached Casa Jalisco and its official resident decided to break the protocol of the security table to record a video in the first square of the municipality he governed more than a decade ago while surrounded by Army units, and a day after the attack, travel to Mazamitla to ask citizens to visit this Magical Town.

And in a huge communication failure, he declared that he would suspend the search protocols, which generated intense pressure among the collectives of relatives of the disappeared, who threatened to hold a mega-march this Sunday, which forced Alfaro to turn on the camera in his office again to explain that they are only suspended when they start from an anonymous call.

The bad news is that eight out of 10 findings are made this way. But there is worse news, and that is that, from the beginning, the searching mothers feel alone in the paradoxical and inhuman task of digging through the earth until they find a trace of the family member that one day was gone... and disappeared.

Digging and digging, regardless of the fact that, literally and figuratively, crime has managed to undermine Jalisco.

Source: INFORMADOR.MX