The following is a direct translation of a story by Elena Reina for El Pais newspaper that was published on October 29, 2022.
Hitman boss' secret wedding that sparked tragedy at Caborca church.
The murder of a groom as he left his wedding ceremony was merely collateral damage in a vicious war between the sons of 'El Chapo' Guzman and Caro Quintero's men for control of the Sonoran desert town that connects to the US.
Neighbors say that since he knew he was going to be killed, he changed his mind. Getting married in the church in the center of town didn't seem like a good option if they were on his heels.
He left a decorated ceremony as bait for the wedding, but looked for another church far from Caborca.
Everyone in this Mexican municipality of 89,000 inhabitants, the last city in the Sonora desert that communicates with the United States, believed that on October 22, at 7:30 pm, a young man nicknamed El Frank, head of the local cartel's hitmen, was going to marry La Chinita, daughter of the first to open a Chinese food restaurant in the area, in La Candelaria. But at the last minute they changed parishes.
Instead, with much less fanfare, a local teacher, Aracely Martinez, got married to an engineer from Durango, Marco Antonio Rosales Contreras [at the church El Frank had originally planned on using].
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| Aracely Martinez and Marco Antonio Rosales Contreras |
As they left the ceremony, a man in a plaid shirt shot Marco Rosales twice in the head and twice in the chest. The screams of the bride, her white dress now soaked in her husband's blood, were the only sound heard that night in Caborca. The sound of bullets often silences its streets.
The Sonora Attorney General's Office acknowledged a day later that the shots were not aimed at Marco Antonio Rosales, as the governor Alfonso Durazo, had insinuated hours earlier, in a hasty attempt to calm things down and repeat the maxim that they only kill "each other."
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| Governor Durazo answers questions from reporters |
They were targeting another man, who got married at the same time, 130 kilometers away. And the government called it a "mistake" and a "direct attack," two terms the authorities usually use to send a confusing message to the population that if they stay away from the narco, from the bad guys, they will be safe.
But the tragedy, yet another one, in Caborca, demonstrated what most citizens of northern Mexico know all too well: no one escapes the terror of this war.
Marco Antonio Rosales was 32 years old, an software engineer working for a company in Guadalajara, Jalisco.
He was planning to move back there with his wife, Aracely Martinez, who had left her teaching position at a private school in Caborca a few months earlier.
They decided to get married in the bride's town. That morning, she had traveled with her parents and sister from Durango to take the place that the man, known as Frank, had not taken at La Candelaria parish.
A few minutes after crossing the church's gate, Marco was riddled with bullets. His sister was shot in the back, but survived.
What the governors call a mistake, in Caborca they call helplessness.
El Frank, according to two veteran reporters from the town, is the head of the cartel's hitmen who allied with the men of Rafael -- as the Narco of Narcos, Rafael Caro Quintero, is known in the area -- the historic leader of the Sinaloa cartel, who founded one of the strongholds of his criminal empire in this desert corner of Sonora.
The capo, arrested for the last time in July of this year, managed in 2013 to free himself from prison after a scandalous judicial decision when he still had 12 years left on his sentence for the murder of a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent in the 1980s.
On the run and with the thirst for U.S. revenge blowing in the back of his head, he declared war on the sons of his former partner, Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, who sought to expand the territories conquered by their father.
Los Chapitos against Caro Quintero's men, grouped by another boss, El Cara de Cochi, in a fierce battle for control of this territory dedicated to drug and migrant trafficking.
To the doors of the church came that battle last weekend. That dying man, whom his relatives tried to resuscitate with cardio pulmonary resuscitation while the ambulance arrived, was not El Frank, but another damned confusion of the sign.
A neighbor, who witnessed the unsuccessful maneuvers to save his life, tells this newspaper that the ambulance took almost half an hour to arrive. For days now the units have decided not to arrive so soon, because the paramedics are also often rained upon by bullets.
The few reporters who cover the area had published that same week that the narco kidnapped six people in Caborca, whose whereabouts are unknown, and executed a gas station employee.
The hail of bullets is so common that those who are closest to the horror "are not able to measure it", says to this newspaper a local reporter who prefers not to give her name. After years of threats, she decided not to put their name as author on a single article or photograph of the violence.
Although the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador boasted a slight decrease in homicides in 2021 at the national level, which maintains a rate of almost 90 per day, in Sonora they increased by 31% with respect to the previous year, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics.
In February of this year, more than 20 armored trucks besieged the town (covered in more detail in this Borderland Beat story). They were Los Chapitos' men. Their calling card in this war was to impose terror on the population with the power of their rifles, random kidnappings and facades pierced by shrapnel.
Neighbors told this newspaper how the gunmen strolled in front of the Army installations. But the gunfire continued throughout the early hours of the morning with no other uniform than that of the Sinaloans.
"There was not a single authority that went out to confront them, all the corporations hid. They left us alone, they abandoned us," said a neighbor.
While Marco Rosales lay dying on the steps of La Candelaria, at the same time, another man came out of another church showing off his marriage. Frank and La Chinita had dodged death at the engineer's expense.
The photos of the secret wedding were shared on their social networks and the whole town soon understood what had happened in downtown Caborca. A neighbor tells that the man in the plaid shirt walked calmly away towards the kiosk in the plaza.
No police pursued him, despite the pleas of the women in party dresses. Almost a week later, not a single person has been arrested for the murder. For there to be a war between criminals, there must also be a high degree of impunity.
