MEXICO CITY — A drug cartel unleashed a coordinated series of seven street bombings in western Mexico, killing four police officers and two civilians, officials said Wednesday. The Jalisco state governor said the blasts were “a trap” set by the cartel to kill police personnel.
Luis Méndez, the Jalisco state’s chief prosecutor, said the explosions late Tuesday in the municipality of Tlajomulco were so violent that they left craters in the road, destroying at least four vehicles and injuring 14 other people.
It appeared to be the first time a Mexican cartel had killed police personnel with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and was the latest example of the country’s increasingly overt, military challenge from drug cartels.
Méndez said the two dead civilians were in a vehicle that happened to be driving by the site when the IEDs exploded in Tlajomulco, near the state capital of Guadalajara. He suggested the bombs might have been detonated remotely, saying the blast “happened at the desired moment”.
He said 12 of the wounded were also civilians, including three children, aged 9, 13 and 14. He said some of the wounded were in serious condition. Experts had to defuse an eighth IED that didn’t explode and warned the area was still dangerous, Méndez said.
Jalisco state governor Enrique Alfaro said an anonymous caller who gave a tip to a volunteer search party about a secret burial site near the road “set a trap” for officials.
For years, the police have not been able to locate the more than 110,000 missing people in Mexico, but they accompany volunteer search parties looking for such hidden graves. The volunteers, usually the mothers of missing people, often receive anonymous tips as to where their loved ones might be buried.
Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro said a total of eight “improvised explosive devices” were placed on the roadway.
“This is a brutal terrorist attack,” Alfaro said at a press conference on Wednesday, blaming an unnamed drug cartel for the deaths. He said he temporarily suspended police escort for voluntary searches to ensure the safety of civilians.
Hector Flores, leader of one of the search parties in Jalisco, said it did not appear that there were any volunteer searchers in the exploded convoy.
“This is an unprecedented act that shows what these drug cartels are capable of,” Alfaro previously wrote on his social media accounts. “This attack also poses an open challenge to the Mexican government at all levels.”
Alfaro did not say who he blamed for the bombing, but the Jalisco drug cartel has extensive experience using improvised explosive devices and bomb-dropping drones. IEDs also wounded ten soldiers in the neighboring state of Michoacan in 2022 and killed one civilian.
Earlier Tuesday, a federal official admitted another cartel killed a National Guard officer with a car bomb in the neighboring state of Guanajuato.
And on Monday, protesters associated with another drug gang fought security forces in the neighboring state of Guerrero, seizing an armored police truck and using it to bring down the gates of the state’s legislature.
Bloody fighting broke out in the Guadalajara area between factions of the Jalisco cartel blamed for the earlier use of IEDs in Mexico.
In February 2022, a road mine in the community of Aguililla, Michoacán, damaged an army vehicle and injured ten soldiers.
A few days later, another IED killed a farmer when he drove his pickup truck over the device. The farmer’s son was injured in the explosion, which appears to have been caused by a device containing ammonium nitrate.
Later, special squads of Mexican Army troops equipped with metal detectors and anti-bomb suits were deployed to the area. Dozens of such devices have been found along country roads and fields in the area around the township of Aguililla.
IEDs have included devices detonated by radio or telephone signals, by pressure – such as being stepped on – or even by vials breaking and connecting two chemicals.
The Jalisco Cartel has been battling the local Viagras gang, also known as the United Cartels, for control of the area for years. These battles used trenches, bunkers, home-made armored cars, and drones modified to drop smaller bombs.
The cartels’ bomb-carrying drones have caused more terror in Michoacan than the landmines. While drone warfare was crude and dangerous to load and operate at first—and still worryingly indiscriminate—it has improved; It is not uncommon for metal barn or shed roofs to be blown open by the impact of drone blasts like tin cans.
Tuesday’s IED attack in Tlajomulco was a major blow to volunteer search groups who rely on anonymous leads to locate mass graves. Investigators often suspect that the clues come from former members of the same cartels who killed their relatives and dumped their bodies.
But the Seekers had long been operating under an uneasy, non-aggressive arrangement with the cartels; The volunteer groups say they are not looking for evidence to prosecute those responsible for kidnapping and killing family members. They say they just want to find the remains to end their insecurity and give their loved ones a decent burial.
However, six search volunteers have been killed in Mexico since 2021. While the motives for these killings remain unclear, activists say the cartels have tried to intimidate searchers, particularly when examining grave sites that are still in use.