Mexico city — Eight months after members of the Sinaloa cartel take the city of Culiacán, and put in a check to the mexican army, the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador first recognized that the decision to release Ovidio Guzman, one of the sons of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the took him.
“I ordered him to stop that operation and that it be left in freedom to this alleged offender,” he said Friday.
On October 17, 2019, the military launched an operation to arrest Ovidio Guzman, but the action ended in a humiliating defeat of the mexican army after the members of the cartel took to the streets of the city heavily armed, they sowed chaos with shootings, took hostage the military and ended up forcing the release of the son of the capo, all in only four hours of terror.
López Obrador insisted that the decision to release the son of Guzman was “to not put in risk the population, that does not affect civilians because they were going to lose their lives -if not suspendíamos the operating – more than 200 innocent people in Culiacán”.
Thirteen people were killed in the shootings at a day that left a mark in the history of the city.
However, there are still things to clarify from that fateful day that put him the popular name of “Culiacanazo”, such as who ordered to start a military offensive without the right preparations because it was logical to assume that the poster was going to retaliate against the arrest of one of the children of their leader.
For the analysts it was a sample of the problems of the government’s strategy in its fight against organized crime.
The Public Safety secretary, Alfonso Durazo, said on a first moment that the operation failed had been a “precipitate action,” but when you knew that it had been planned for at least a week spoke of a “stumbling tactical”.
The schedule presented by the government after the events showed that the united States had ordered the arrest of Guzmán in September and eight days before an antinarcotics unit of the mexican army had traveled from Mexico City to Culiacan to prepare.
That same schedule, along with a video that saw Guzman stopped asking his brothers to stop shooting, not clear, then, that would have been the president who gave the order to withdraw. López Obrador had boarded a commercial flight to the southern state of Oaxaca minutes before the operation was officially cancelled.
“At that time possibly the president made the right decision because it could have been a massacre,” said Ismael Bojorquez, editor of the newspaper specialized in drug trafficking Ríodoce after the recent statements of the representative.
“But everything before that decision was wrong and it was clear that a criminal group run by young people, the Chapitos (the name is known to the children of “El Chapo”) brought down to the armed forces,” he added.
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