Mexican drug cartels

Álvaro Arandas was approaching the check-in counter at Culiacán international airport when the pandemonium began.

“You could hear the shooting – huge blasts, so much noise,” said the Mexican businessman, who had planned to board a flight to the eastern city of San Luis Potosí.

Instead, Arandas found himself scrambling for cover as security forces and cartel gunmen fought for control of an airfield that had become the latest frontline of a Latin American drug conflict that claims tens of thousands of lives every year.

And the beat goes on …

Mexican authorities have captured Ovidio Guzmán, a son of incarcerated drugs kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, prompting a furious response from cartel gunmen in the northern city of Culiacán.

After a night of violence, gunmen exchanged fire with security forces, blocking roads with burning vehicles and shooting at army helicopters and police aeroplanes bringing reinforcements to the city.

According to one resident, heavy fighting raged for hours after Guzmán – a key figure in the Sinaloa cartel since the arrest of his father – was arrested early on Thursday.

With more than 26,000 murders this year, it is clear the president’s strategy of using the military to control the crime gangs has failed

The news came almost as fast as the bullets were fired: a judge murdered in cold blood; cartel members attempting a prison break; five people killed at a bar in a popular port city.

The surge in violence over a single weekend in Mexico brought a torrent of headlines that are increasingly familiar as powerful gangs battle for control of the country: shootouts, cars set on fire, bodies lying in the street.

The craziness is spreading into border states.

The butchered remains of three people washed ashore in Acapulco, Mexico, over the weekend — shocking beachgoers at the once-thriving holiday hotspot.

Gruesome photos show a body lying face-up on sun-soaked Condesa beach as tourists gawk and families wade in the water nearby.

I have no desire to visit Mexico for some reason.

Rev. Alfredo Gallegos, better known as Padre Pistolas to many in the Mexican state of Michoacan for his pro-self defense advocacy against cartel violence, has allegedly been suspended by the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico, and though officials have said nothing publicly about the reasons for the suspension, there’s really only one controversial position the pastor has taken; fight back against the drug cartels that are destroying the community.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s former attorney general was arrested Friday in connection with the violent abduction and likely massacre of 43 students in 2014, a significant breakthrough in one of the most notorious atrocities in modern Mexican history.

He is the first high-level official to be detained in connection to the case, and the authorities said Friday that they had also issued more than 80 arrest warrants related to it, including for military officers, police officers and cartel members.

It was not immediately clear if any of those warrants had led to other arrests, but their sudden announcement came just a day after the Mexican government said an official inquiry had found the disappearance of the students to be a “crime of the state” involving every layer of government.

A prison confrontation between members of two rival cartels spilled on to the streets of the border city Ciudad Juárez, where alleged gang members have killed nine more people, including four employees of a radio station.

The violence began on Thursday, when Los Chapos, members of the infamous Sinaloa cartel formerly led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, clashed with the local group Los Mexicles, in a Juárez prison, the deputy security minister, Ricardo Mejía, said.

Mexico claims that half a million guns flow south from the US every year. Can a lawsuit against American gun manufacturers stem the tide?

Just before sunrise on a warm Friday morning in June 2020, gunmen were waiting for Omar Garcia Harfuch, the city’s then 38-year-old security head, in Mexico City’s upscale Lomas de Chapultepec neighbourhood.

What happened next would be captured on CCTV and the mobile phone cameras of terrified onlookers: the rat-a-tat-tat of bullets as dozens of heavily armed gunmen, some dressed as road workers, blocked his path with a truck and opened fire.

Mexicans have been left wondering what happened to about a dozen men who disappeared after they were seen lined up against a wall by drug cartel gunmen.

In a video apparently filmed by a resident of the town San José de Gracia in the western state of Michoacán and posted on social media, bursts of gunfire broke out and smoke covered the scene.

The camera cuts away, and most observers assumed all the men – perhaps as many as 17 – died.

Not to make light of the Ukraine but more are killed daily in Sunny Mexico.

Three years ago reporter Lourdes Maldonado López stood up before Mexico’s president at a press conference and told him: “I fear for my life.”

On Sunday she was gunned down in the city of Tijuana – the third Mexican journalist to be killed this year in what is a deepening murder crisis facing the country’s press corps and its populist leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Maldonado, a former journalist for Mexico’s biggest network, Televisa, was reportedly shot in her car outside her home at about 6.20pm.