Four municipal police officers were murdered while patrolling the highway connecting the municipalities of Celaya and Salvatierra in Guanajuato, the local Secretariat for Citizen Security confirmed. The agents were attacked with bullets by an armed commando at around eight o'clock on Wednesday evening near the municipality of Santa María del Refugio. “Place where they were attacked with gunfire and although they repelled the attack, they died on the spot,” says the statement from the Celaya agency, which assures that “it will not give in in the fight against crime” .
The massacres occur in Guanajuato. The state, ruled by PAN member Diego Sinhue Rodríguez, is sinking into a spiral of violence. Several murders occur one after the other without the government or prosecutors seeming able to put an end to them. The murder of the four police officers from Celaya occurred as they tried to guard the highway that connects the two communities affected by the youth massacres.
On December 4, the bodies of the brothers Fabián and Jesús Orozco Mateos, their cousin Pedro Mateos Puente and their friends Bryan Jesús Amoles, José Eduardo Freire Ortega and Luis Giovanni Juárez were found. They were medical students at Universidad Latina on the Celaya campus. They showed various signs of violence, including those involving firearms. The oldest was 23 years old and the youngest was 18 years old. Prosecutors have arrested a suspected perpetrator of the crime, whose name or connection to an organized group is unknown. Nothing was known about the course of the investigation or the motive for the murder of six students.
A few days later, terror struck Guanajuato again. 11 young people were murdered while celebrating a Christmas party on a farm in Salvatierra. The attack shocked the country, which was used to celebrations of this kind in December. So far it is believed that several members of organized crime arrived at the scene of the young people's event, wanted to go in, and when they were refused entry, they came back with more killers and shot the boys. “They just arrived, entered and shot continuously,” Angie Almanza, a relative of two of the victims, told EL PAÍS, “the only aim was to kill.” 195 bullet casings were found at the scene.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who at the start of both trials tried to blame the youth by pointing to “drug abuse,” also put pressure on Guanajuato prosecutor Carlos Zamarripa, pinpointing him as one of the main people responsible for the wave the violence that plagues the creature. “More research is needed,” the president said in December. Nothing has improved since then. This year began with an afternoon of terror in the state due to drug blockades and burning of vehicles by organized crime groups.
Guanajuato is largely controlled by the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel, led by José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, aka “El Marro,” who is currently in prison. The area is now trying to be contested by one of Mexico's strongest criminal organizations, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The murder of the police officers is the latest example of a country where violence never ends. According to the civil organization Causa en Común, Guanajuato was the state where the most public security officers were murdered in 2023, with 60 cases.
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