The Dead Of Loreto And The New Bloodbath In Zacatecas

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

Zacatecas splashes in the blood left by the struggle between the Northeast Cartel, the Pacific Cartel and the CJNG.

At the traffic circle at the entrance to Loreto, Zacatecas, lying on the colorful sign "Welcome to Loreto" that welcomes visitors, five half-naked corpses with visible signs of torture were abandoned last Saturday night.

The assailants had sat them down. All of them had their heads down. There were traces of blood on the floor: it was the newest scene of horror for the inhabitants of this municipality located in the southeast of Zacatecas, where executions and confrontations are constant and it is possible to see at all hours the passage of vehicles manned by armed people.

In addition to the dead in Loreto, on the same day the bodies of two people were found handcuffed, tortured and with their faces covered, in the municipality of Guadalupe.

To all these deaths were added the bodies of three state police officers shot the following day from a house in the Buenavista neighborhood of Zacatecas: they were responding to a 911 report: in the confrontation, three assailants were killed.

Drowned by executions, homicides, disappearances and forced displacements, Zacatecas is splashing in the blood that has resulted from the struggle between three groups: the Northeast Cartel, the Pacific Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. 

It ranks first place for police killed. Of nine agents who lost their lives violently in 2019, 60 police officers were executed in 2022. That is 30 so far this year and 161 since the beginning of the six-year term.

The government of David Monreal attributes the violence to "groups outside the state", as the Secretary of Government Rodrigo Reyes Mugüerza has just declared.

External or not, they have filled the Zacatecan landscape with insecurity and violence.

Just on October 31, Francisco Murillo Ruiseco resigned from his position for "personal reasons". He left without rendering accounts before the Congress, which had called him to appear before it, one year and three months before the end of his term, and leaving behind him a sack of unresolved relevant cases and an entity where 72% of homicides and femicides of minors have occurred during the current six-year term.

In fact, Zacatecas occupies third place in the country with the highest number of child victims of homicides and femicides committed with firearms.

A month and a half ago the country was shaken by the kidnapping of seven adolescents between 14 and 18 years of age, who were abducted from a ranch in Malpaso, in the municipality of Villanueva, and six of whom were brutally murdered by members of organized crime.

Periodically, and in spite of the speeches, the appearance of corpses hanging from bridges, abandoned en masse on the highways, or placed inside vehicles, occupy the main headlines of the media.

Among the aspirants who have registered to occupy the place left vacant by Murillo Ruiseco, there are at least three people close to the government of David Monreal: the delegate in Zacatecas of the Attorney General's Office, Cristian Camacho Osnaya; Ángel Muñoz Muro, technical secretary of the Peace Building Table, and the sub-secretary of Operations of the public security secretariat, Óscar Aparicio Avendaño.

The latter had been appointed last year as head of the Security Secretariat in the cabinet of Américo Villarreal, in Tamaulipas. The Ministry of Defense overturned his appointment, alleging the existence of "irregularities" in the exercise of his functions.

Aparicio Avendaño was in charge of the State Security Commission in the state of Chihuahua, between 2017 and 2019, when said state ranked in the top ten of homicides nationwide.

Américo Villarreal surprisingly "dropped" him from his list of collaborators, hours before he himself was to take the oath of office.

Today, in the midst of an unstoppable bloodbath that the Secretariat of Public Security has not even been able to alleviate, the right arm of General Arturo Medina Mayoral aspires to become, like Camacho Osnaya and Muñoz Muro -as pointed out a few days ago in the Kiosko column of EL UNIVERSAL- the new brother prosecutor of Zacatecas.

Politics first. The security of the citizens... we will see.

El Universal  Borderland Beat Archives