Black February In Tlaquepaque: Jalisco

 "Char" for Borderland Beat 

This article was translated and reposted from INFORMADOR.MX

By: Jaime Barrera

February 20, 2024 - 02:07 am

As on the first weekend of February, last Sunday Tlaquepaque woke up to the tragic news of another multiple homicide. Aggravated this time because, among the seven victims, five were minors between 14 and 15 years of age, including two teenage girls.

This multiple murder is added to the three triple homicides that were registered in three days, from the 4th to the 6th of this month. Not counting the also numerous cases of individual fatal assaults, there are now 16 victims in four direct assaults on three or more people.

With nine days to go, February will become a black month for Tlaquepaque.

The multiple crimes early Sunday morning occurred in Colonia Buenos Aires, in the upper part of Cerro del Cuatro. It was reported after six o'clock in the morning and police officers from the Tlaquepaque Police Station who acted as first responders arrived at 6:20 a.m., according to official records. They found the lifeless bodies, all with gunshot wounds to the skull, of two unidentified 16-year-old minors; Juan Diego Guadalupe Solís Amezquita, 14; José de Jesús Chávez, 15; Óscar Eduardo Ventura González, 20; Julián Isaac Martínez Rodríguez, 23; and Everardo García Dávalos, 15, who died while receiving medical attention.

All of the identified victims were residents of Tlaquepaque. Some were from Colonia Buenos Aires, where they were murdered in the middle of the street, and others lived in neighboring neighborhoods such as Francisco I. Madero and Arroyo de las Flores.

The first police versions, made public prosecutor Joaquín Méndez last Sunday, said that the assaulted youths had been living together in a popular bar, known as Tropi Dance, which operates at the foot of the Cerro del Cuatro, and where in recent years there have been frequent episodes of deadly violence. The first hypothesis is that they had a conflict inside the bar that later provoked the aggression with bullets.

Given the context of violence in Tlaquepaque and the brutality of the attack, it was difficult to think that everything was due to a bar fight. Yesterday the prosecutor himself incorporated the line of investigation of a possible dispute between organized crime groups and said that ballistics tests will be carried out to confirm or rule out if there is a relationship between this and the other three multi-murders committed in this black February that has mourned this metropolitan municipality, The arrival of 400 soldiers sent by the Secretary of National Defense (Sedena) after the first two triple homicides has done little to inhibit violence.

jbarrera4r@gmail.com

SOURCE: INFORMADOR.MX