On October 23, police officers were murdered in Coyuca de Benítez (Guerrero state). Cuartoscuro
This Monday, in Guerrero, a group of armed men shot and killed the Minister of Public Security of Coyuca de Benítez, Alfredo Alonso, and twelve other agents. Among the 12 is the director of preventive police, Honorio Salinas, operational director of the company. The public prosecutor’s office confirmed the facts in the afternoon, but did not provide too many details. Deputy Public Prosecutor Gabriel Hernández has indicated that “some investigations into the events” are already underway.
Local media have reported that the killers ambushed police on the highway between Acapulco and Zihuatanejo, the two major tourist towns on Guerrero’s central and northern coast. Apparently the criminal convoy intercepted the agents shortly after noon near the town of El Papayo, about 20 minutes from the center of Coyuca. El Diario El Sur points out that the killers first killed Alonso, Salinas and their four bodyguards. Then they would have taken the rest and killed them half a kilometer away.
Deputy Prosecutor Hernández stated: “We have no reports from the authorities of this municipality of threats of any kind against officials. “We are checking the opened investigation files for events that occurred there.” With more than 70,000 inhabitants, Coyuca de Benítez is one of the most important communities on the Guerrero coast. It is close to Acapulco, but also to the municipalities of Tecpan, Atoyac and Benito Juárez, which guard the highway that connects the coast and the mountains.
Forensic experts are working at the scene of the events this Monday, guarded by National Guard agents. Carlos Alberto Carbajal (Cuartoscuro)
This attack came just a month after the assassination of the head of the federal prosecutor’s office in Chilpancingo, the capital, and the head of the local prosecutor’s office in the Tierra Caliente region. Security has deteriorated in several regions of the state in recent months, with massacres, blockades and drone attacks. As of September this year, the state has recorded 1,289 murder victims. The forecast is that there will be more than 1,650 by the end of the year, a number the region has not seen since 2019.
Although the public prosecutor’s office has not provided any information about the motive for the attack or the possible perpetrators, state authorities have been processing information for months about the advance of the criminal group La Familia Michoacana along Guerrero’s Costa Grande. The newspaper El Sur and before it Reforma have published articles in these months about the advance of the group, whose bastion is the region immediately to the north, Tierra Caliente.
According to Reforma, suspected allies of La Familia Michoacana organized blockades in Acapulco in early August due to the alleged arrest of the mother of one of their bosses. The criminals set fire to more than a dozen vehicles in the northern area of the port, right on the highway that runs through Coyuca, Tecpan and beyond to Zihuatanejo. Days later, residents of mountain towns in the region blocked the same highway in protest against the criminal group they said was laying siege to their communities.
The family’s ambition has increased in recent years. Also his aggressiveness and his firepower. Between late 2021 and early 2022, the group committed massacres and murders in cities in Tierra Caliente, particularly in San Miguel Totolapan and Coyuca de Catalán. Faced with the assassination of the regional prosecutor in September, precisely in Coyuca de Catalán, his boss, prosecutor Sandra Valdovinos, pointed this out to La Familia.
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