Unbridled violence in Michoacán: an armed group murders 19 people in a palenque

The violence in the State of Michoacán does not lift its foot. This time it was a massacre during a cockfight in Las Tinajas, municipality of Zinapécuaro, where an armed group opened fire on Sunday night, killing 19 people. The Michoacán prosecutor’s office confirmed to the local media the death of 16 men and three women, as well as the brutality of the attack that left an undetermined number of wounded. According to the official information released, the shooting began at 10:30 p.m. local time (nine hours more in mainland Spain), when a group of civilians dressed in military uniforms and equipped with long weapons burst into the place and opened fire on the attendees. to a clandestine palenque where a cockfight was being held.

The Crime Scene and Expert Services Unit (USPEC) went to the place where the 19 bodies were found, all of them shot by firearms. The Secretary of Security of Michoacán confirmed on Twitter that soldiers from the Army and the National Guard traveled to the scene of the massacre, participating in a coordinated operation to locate the perpetrators.

The videos broadcast on social networks by the neighbors allow the dozens of bullets to be heard in an operation that was carried out in a few minutes. The Michoacan journalist Marcos Morales, present at the scene, wrote on his Twitter profile that the death toll is 20 and that “it was not a shootout between the attendees, but an execution.”

The community of Las Tinajas, in Zinapécuaro, is located 55 kilometers from the capital, Morelia, and is located very close to the borders of the states of Michoacán, Guanajuato and the State of Mexico. Michoacán is involved in a spiral of violence in which at least a dozen cartels clash daily with the Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) for control of the region, birthplace of CJNG leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias The MenchoThe most wanted criminal in the country. However, the proximity of Zinapécuaro to Guanajuato places the municipality at the epicenter of fuel traffic or guachicolthe clandestine extraction of gasoline from the Pemex pipelines that cross the area and that also confronts local groups.

Michoacán, a prosperous region in western Mexico, where much of the avocado and lemon consumed by the United States comes from, has macabre scenes of violence for breakfast every day, ranging from the shooting of rival hitmen in broad daylight or the use of homemade tanks in indigenous towns, as happened last weekend. Despite the fact that the central government has sent thousands of National Guard troops to Michoacán since the beginning of the year, more than 200 people are murdered each month and two journalists have been murdered.

Also in Michoacán, for the first time in the country’s history, the Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the use of landmines against the Army in the Tierra Caliente region, an area made up of ten municipalities that since the 1980s have served drug traffickers for cultivation and production. of marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl or, more recently, cocaine.

The governor of Michoacán, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, of the ruling party Morena, attributes the wave of violence in his state to the carelessness of previous governments, while acknowledging that just two months ago, the Army managed to enter municipalities such as Tepalcatepec, Aguililla, Coalcomán , Chinicuila and Aquila, all in the Tierra Caliente fringe, where they had not been able to enter for several years.

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