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An armed group ambushed and killed more than a dozen law enforcement officers in southwestern Mexico on Monday, including a local security secretary and a police chief, adding to a growing number of deadly attacks on police in the region.
The massacre, in Coyuca de Benítez, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, left 13 security agents dead, including the municipality’s security secretary, Alfredo Alonso López, and the director of the municipal police, Honorio Salinas Garay, according to a spokesman of the Guerrero state prosecutor’s office. office.
Guerrero is now the second most dangerous state in Mexico for law enforcement officers, with more than 34 deaths so far in 2023, according to Common Cause, a Mexico-based organization that tracks killings of police officers in the country. The group said more than 340 police officers had been killed so far this year in the country, and more than 400 last year.
“We demand justice and zero impunity,” said Common Cause in a declaration.
Although President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office promising to make Mexico safer, he downplayed violence in the country and blamed the problem on his predecessors. But clashes between rival drug trafficking organizations have drawn criticism, including from the United States. López Obrador has said that much of the violence in the country is due to the United States’ inability to prevent weapons from being trafficked into southern Mexico. Leaders from both countries discussed the roots of such violence during high-profile meetings in Mexico City this month.
Guerrero, a state plagued by turf wars between drug cartel organizations, has been particularly dangerous for law enforcement officials. Alonso López’s predecessor as security secretary in Coyuca de Benítez, David Borja Padilla, survived an assassination attempt in December 2022.
The violence of recent years can be attributed to rival drug cartels competing for territory in the state, which includes the tourist area of Acapulco as well as a mountainous environment used for growing marijuana and poppy, according to Eduardo Guerrero, a businessman. based in Mexico. Intelligence consultant who works with local governments in the country. He said some of the criminals in the area had been attacking law enforcement after the federal government built a new military installation in the state last year.
“We have attacks every week,” Guerrero said of the state’s drug cartels, which seem to “specialize in killing police officers.”
Attacks on security officials have become common in Tierra Caliente, a region shared by Guerrero, Michoacán and the State of Mexico, where conflicts between rival cartels have led to an increase in violence. Two prosecutors in Guerrero They were killed just days apart in September. Shot by a drug gang until death 20 people, among them a mayor and his father, in the mountains of Guerrero in October of last year. And gunmen ambushed and massacred 13 law enforcement officers in the State of Mexico in March 2021.
In a video message, Guerrero’s deputy prosecutor for investigations, Gabriel Alejandro Hernández Mendoza, said that security officials in Coyuca de Benítez had not approached state authorities to report the threats against them. He added that the prosecutor’s office was investigating the murders.
“This prosecutor’s office is committed to carrying out all investigative acts, both in the field and in the office, as well as intelligence actions, in order to clarify the facts,” he said.