Hundreds of people demonstrated this Sunday in the Mexican state of Sinaloa (northwest) to demand an end to a wave of violence attributed to an internal struggle of a powerful drug trafficking cartel that has left dozens dead since September 9.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who ends his term on October 1, lamented this Sunday the death of three soldiers in a scuffle on Friday, when he visited that state.
“A group of soldiers were harmed and three died,” he said from the city of Chetumal (southeast), specifying that the uniformed men were carrying out surveillance work “to avoid clashes between organized crime.”
“It hurt me a lot because they were in the line of duty,” added the president, who was in a rural community in Sinaloa.
This Sunday’s demonstration took place in the capital, Culiacán, where most of the dozens of deaths are reported from 20 days of shootings and blockades of streets and highways.
“We demand a peace agenda,” read the banners carried by hundreds of protesters, most dressed in white. Others carried images of missing people, AFP found.
Most of the attendees declined to answer questions from journalists.
This outbreak of violence is attributed to a fight between the children of drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and those close to another of the co-founders of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
Zambada, 76 years old and one of the historical leaders of that criminal group along with Guzmán, was arrested in the United States on July 25, where he was taken on a plane by one of Chapo’s sons.
The veteran capo accuses Guzmán Jr. of kidnapping him and handing him over to American justice.
López Obrador, for his part, has blamed the United States for this bloody dispute.
The leftist concludes his government on Tuesday with a record of almost 200,000 murders in his six-year term.
The outgoing president has favored the so-called “hugs, not bullets” policy, providing financial aid to young people to prevent them from being recruited by criminals.
López Obrador passes the reins to his ally Claudia Sheinbaum, who anticipates that he will continue that same strategy, but strengthening coordination between law enforcement and the attorney general’s office.
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