Two more police officers shot dead in Mexico’s most dangerous city for police as cartel violence rages: ‘It hurts’

Two police officers were shot dead in the embattled Mexican city. Celaya amid a wave of targeted attacks that authorities said on Thursday were likely carried out by a drug cartel.

A total of 18 police officers have been shot dead in Celaya so far this year. This makes the city of half a million inhabitants probably the most dangerous city in the hemisphere for the police.

“This is something that worries us greatly and, more than that, it hurts,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said of the attacks.

Authorities confirmed that gunmen opened fire on police in at least four different locations in and around Celaya on Wednesday. Police and federal government sources said the brutal Santa Rosa de Lima gang appeared to be behind the attacks.

An official of Celaya’s 300-strong police force, who was not authorized to comment publicly on the incident, said armed men opened fire on three unarmed traffic police officers in the city as they set up a checkpoint to check vehicle registrations.

The official said two officers died in the attack and a third was injured and is in stable condition at a local hospital.

López Obrador said the attacks had become brutal and indiscriminate and blamed lenient or corrupt judges.

“Why bother the traffic cops?” asked López Obrador. “Besides, they weren’t carrying weapons.”

The president said the attacks could be linked to a judge’s decision in June to allow the son of the jailed founder of the Santa Rosa CartelThe son was arrested in January for illegal possession of weapons and drugs.

López Obrador presented a report on the attacks on Thursday, which showed that a group of armed men attacked traffic police on a street in broad daylight. Shortly afterward, armed men hit another police patrol car with bullets, but apparently caused no injuries. They then fired at a local police building, where no injuries were reported.

Later on Wednesday, however, police also came under fire in the nearby town of Villagran, 19 kilometers west of Celaya, with one officer reportedly seriously injured.

The Celaya police official said members of the force feel they are not receiving enough support from the federal and state governments, and that the relatively small contingent of local police have been largely left alone in the fight against the brutal Santa Rosa gang.

López Obrador has cut most of the federal funds once used to train Mexico’s police forces, preferring instead to spend the money on building up the quasi-military National Guard, which has 117,000 troops.

However, the military-trained Guard officers mainly carry out routine patrols and are not responsible for investigations and arrests, as the police usually do. In addition, López Obrador is now pushing for constitutional reform to place the Guard – which is currently nominally under the Ministry of Public Security – under full military control.

State plagued by cartel violence

Celaya is located in the central-northern state of Guanajuato. More police officers were shot here in 2023 – about 60 – than in the entire United States.

Guanajuato has the highest murder rate of any state in Mexico, largely due to drug cartels’ violence. For years, the Santa Rosa cartel has been engaged in a bloody turf war with the Jalisco cartel for control of Guanajuato.

In addition to the police, politicians and civilians have also been targeted. Just last month, a baby and a toddler were among six members of the same family murdered in Guanajuato. In April, a mayoral candidate shot on the street in Guanajuato, just as she began her election campaign.

Last December, 11 people were killed and another dozen were injured in an attack on a pre-Christmas party in the state. Just days earlier, the Bodies of five university students were found trapped in a vehicle on a dirt road in Guanajuato.

The US State Department is urging Americans to reconsider travel to Guanajuato. “Of particular concern is the high number of murders in the south of the state that are linked to cartel violence,” the department said in a travel warning.

In Mexico, more than 450,000 murders have been recorded since 2006, when the government deployed the military to combat drug trafficking. Most of the killings have been attributed to criminal gangs.

AFP contributed to this report.