CJNG Hitwomen

 "Char" for Borderland Beat 

This article was translated and reposted from ZETA TIJUANA 

The shooting death of Carlos Manuel Flores Amezcua, deputy director of the Zapopan, Jalisco municipal police, on Monday morning, November 13, in a cafeteria in the same district, was shocking for the brutality and viciousness with which he was hunted down by his killers, who were patiently waiting for him in the establishment. However, what shocked officials and inhabitants of the country, and even abroad, was the participation of two women among the shooters, apparently members of the Jalisco Cartel - New Generation (CJNG).

This is not the first time that female assassins have been involved in the cadres of criminal organizations dedicated mainly to drug trafficking; there are plenty of precedents in the cells of groups such as Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel and even the Sinaloa Cartel. Women who before were only involved in crime because they were partners or companions of the leaders, later became food and cleaning providers, accountants and administrators. For more than a decade there have been women trained for the tasks of violence, including ex-police and ex-military women.

Flores Amezcua, a police officer known for his clean record of service and for having climbed all the rungs of the Zapopan police station, where he joined 27 years earlier as a cyclopolice until he became 1603 - deputy director of operations - never imagined he would die the way it happened: at the hands of empowered women who perform the same functions as a man in the assassination, with the advantage that not even an experienced police officer could suspect them.

It was 09:57 hours when the police commander arrived confidently, walking, to Ganik Café, a small commercial plaza located on Patria Avenue almost on the corner with Beethoven in the La Estancia subdivision of Zapopan. The exact time is provided by the video surveillance cameras of both the cafeteria and a store located on the sidewalk across the street, which have served the authorities and public opinion to warn of the magnitude of the perverse scheme.

While Carlos Manuel walks on the sidewalk to the doors of the establishment, on the immediate entrance terrace there are two tables occupied by couples, one on each side of the central entrance, apparently drinking hot beverages. The police chief crosses the area with his two hands inside the pockets of his navy blue Nike sports jacket that covered his uniform shirt; he is also wearing his work pants and black patent leather shoes, because he likes to wear those shoes. And a cap of the same sports brand as the jacket.

In the terrace area, 03, as he was identified by his staff, turned curiously for a few seconds towards the couple on his left side and continued walking the few meters that separated him from the glass door to enter the closed part of the cafeteria, when the two men and the two women took their weapons out of their clothes and bags to, in a quick movement, shoot the police deputy director with more than 20 bullets. This is the 23rd policeman killed in Jalisco so far this year. The execution took only 20 seconds.

The killers fled running through the parking area, while one of the two women, who still fired two shots from the interior door of the café at the victim, ran on the sidewalk of the plaza in the opposite direction to the traffic of the vehicles that were passing through the busy Patria Avenue. There, at least a fifth person was seen leaving in a hurry, some of them on foot to board a car and two escaped on a food delivery motorcycle.

The municipal president of Zapopan, Juan José Frangie, immediately expressed his condolences through social networks, confirming: "With great pain, I inform you that this morning our dear friend and commissioner of our @PoliciaZapopan, Carlos Flores Amezcua, suffered a cowardly attack that took his life".

The fallen public servant was dismissed in an intimate tribute in the police corporation, with the presence of family, friends and his colleagues, far from the lenses and microphones of the press, which is kept away from the information and investigations.

CRIMES BY DESIGN

The first known evidence of the presence of female assassins in the CJNG came to light in 2013, after several of its members were arrested and implicated in various murders. One of them, nicknamed El Tiliche, revealed the organizational chart that he knew of the clan headed by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias El Mencho, who was seconded in command by his son Ruben Oseguera Gonzalez, El Menchito; his brothers-in-law Los Cuinis, Gonzalez Valencia, in the financial operation; the regional boss Ivan Cazarin Molina, Tornado or El Tanque; then Danny Quintero, the Guadalajara plaza boss; then El Camaron and Ricardo Ruiz Velazco, El Tripa and/or RR.

Reporting to the now famous RR or Double R, was Ana Karen Bravo Gutiérrez, alias La Loca, La Güera, La Señora and/or La Chiva Loca, who was initially a hitwoman, who was named in various preliminary investigations for homicides attributed to the CJNG, until she rose to the coordination of transmitting Ruiz Velazco's orders to hitmen like Jonathan García, Jhon Perro and others who were involved in the murder of the then Jalisco Secretary of Tourism, J. Jesús Gallegos Álvarez, on March 9, 2013. Ana Karen was arrested a year later, aged 21.

The appearance of another cartel hitwoman came to light after the murder of the former governor of Jalisco, Jorge Aristoteles Sandoval Diaz, in the early hours of Friday, December 18, 2020, in the restaurant bar Distrito 5 in Puerto Vallarta. The former governor, who served from 2013 to 2018, was shot when he was returning from the bathroom to the table where he was with three people, while his bodyguards were waiting outside the establishment. According to video surveillance camera images, a couple approached him to shoot him in a long hallway.

Weeks later, the Jalisco prosecutor's office identified the two alleged participants in Aristoteles' crime and offered a reward of one million pesos to anyone who provided information on their identity or whereabouts. The female assassin was slim, well-built, about 30 years old, with a fair complexion and long, dyed blond hair; she was wearing blue jeans, a light-colored sweatshirt and comfortable running shoes. The male gunman, also approximately 30 years old, light brown complexion, short black hair, was wearing blue jeans, black t-shirt and sneakers. Never arrested, nor his identity revealed. Only the waiters were prosecuted for concealment.

On Saturday October 21, 2022, at the Sonora Grill restaurant on Terranova Avenue, between Florencia and Turin in the Providencia neighborhood in Guadalajara, the general coordinator of the Cabinet of the municipal government of Puerto Vallarta and director of the Potable Water and Sewage System, Salvador Llamas Urbina, was shot and killed. Eight to ten people participated in this orchestrated crime, among them a woman who acted as a companion, but who presumably also carried a firearm in her purse. Llamas sat at the table with two individuals, one of whom left, while the other shot him at close range. The subject who was with the woman protected the escape of the assassins from the crime scene.

In relation to this crime, the Jalisco prosecutor, Luis Joaquín Méndez Ruíz, stated:

"One of the peculiarities in this case that is being investigated is precisely the way in which everything is designed, how everything was planned to carry out the crime that we are investigating".

In the streets surrounding the intervention site there were numerous devices of the so-called ponchallantas to prevent the authorities from following the perpetrators who fled in several vehicles. One of the alleged assailants and a bodyguard of the official, who was also a national advisor of the Morena party, were also killed.

The deputy director of the Zapopan Municipal Police, Carlos Manuel Flores Amezcua, was murdered in a cafeteria in the municipality of Zapopan on Monday, November 13.

The then sub-secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, Ricardo Mejía Berdeja, assured that "the modus operandi was similar to others used in Puerto Vallarta, for example, the case of the murder of Aristóteles Sandoval".

In the murder of Carlos Flores Amezcua, Zapopan's deputy director of operations, on November 13, the two female assassins, both young women of approximately 30 years of age, were perfectly coordinated with their male partner. The first of them, dressed in sports clothes, as well as the man accompanying her, fired a single-handed shot. She was the one in charge of finishing off the public servant. The second woman was paired with a man, both in casual clothing, and they fired while securing the weapon with both hands. In both cases with dexterity and synchrony.

Unfortunately, in all these crimes there was no reaction from the authorities, not even from the bodyguards of the murdered persons, much less from the C5 Urban Shield system that is in charge of monitoring thousands of video surveillance cameras installed in the Metropolitan Zone of Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. Days go by and there is no information on the criminals who killed Flores Amezcua, nor has the investigation file been prosecuted in order to request any search or other proceedings from the Judicial Power.

UNSAFE MUNICIPALITY

Despite having one of the most recognized public security forces in the country, the municipality of Zapopan does not escape the serious violence that afflicts Jalisco with homicides, shootings, femicides, kidnappings, missing persons and multiple clandestine graves. The presence of organized crime is significant in this district of contrasts, where on the one hand there are the best hotels, private universities and car dealerships, and on the other hand, relevant belts of misery just across the Periferico ring road. The families of Rafael Caro Quintero, El Mencho, Chapo Guzman, the Esparragoza, Valencia, Coronel and in other times the Arellano Felix and Carrillo families have settled here.

It is enough to recall some of the most relevant events of the three-year term of Mayor Juan José Frangie, of Movimiento Ciudadano, a party that also supports the current governor Enrique Alfaro Ramírez. On February 8, 2021, a shootout broke out at Los Otates restaurant in the exclusive area of Andares, between more than 20 armed subjects who took a person deprived of liberty and one of their hitmen presumed dead in the box of a pick-up truck. On November 16 of that year, in the same area of Puerta de Hierro, the Secretary of the Navy arrested Rosalinda González Valencia, wife of CJNG leader Nemesio Oseguera, without violence.

As a result of this action, in revenge, the criminal group picked up two members of the Navy, a man and a woman, causing a large deployment of vehicles and aircraft of the naval sector, until a week later, the soldiers were found alive, lying in a vacant lot in Puerto Vallarta. Another scandal erupted on May 21 after the disappearance of eight young people working in a clandestine call center, operated by the CJNG to commit fraud through time-share negotiations with foreigners. The bodies of the victims were found dismembered weeks later in a ravine in Zapopan.

On Saturday, September 24, on the famous Patria Avenue, at the intersection with Gabrielle D'Annunzio, the mayor of Cotija, Michoacán, Yolanda Sánchez Figueroa, was deprived of her freedom by armed men on the way to the hotel where they were staying, while traveling in a rental car along with two other women, coming from the Andares shopping center. She was released early the following Tuesday morning in Michoacan territory, after receiving threats and alleged administrative requests from the CJNG.

In this case, the C5 video camera monitoring did not work in real time either.

Source: ZETA TIJUANA