Twenty-four people died and seven others were injured after gunmen broke into an unregistered drug rehab center in central Mexico and opened fire.
During Wednesday’s attack, the assailants shot everyone inside the center, in the city of Irapuato, in the state of Guanajuato. Three of the seven wounded were reported in serious condition.
State police said that no one was kidnapped. The photos purporting to show the scene suggest that those in the center were lying down when they were sprayed with bullets.
Guanajuato is the scene of a bloody territorial battle between the Jalisco cartel and a local gang, and the state has become the most violent in Mexico.
No motive was given in the attack, but Governor Diego Sinhué Rodríguez Vallejo said the drug gangs appeared to have been involved.
“I deeply regret and condemn the events in Irapuato this afternoon,” wrote the governor. “The violence generated by organized crime not only takes the lives of young people, but also takes peace away from families in Guanajuato.”
Calderón sends the army
Mexico’s “war on drugs” began in late 2006 when then-President Felipe Calderón ordered thousands of soldiers to take to the streets in response to an explosion of horrific violence in his home state of Michoacán.
Calderón hoped to crush the drug cartels with his heavily militarized attack, but the approach was counterproductive and had a catastrophic human cost. As the Mexican army went on the offensive, the body count soared to new heights and tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes, disappeared, or died.
Kingpin strategy
Simultaneously, Calderón also began to pursue the so-called “capo strategy” by which the authorities sought to behead the cartels by attacking their leaders.
That policy resulted in some high-profile scalps, in particular Arturo Beltrán Leyva, who was shot dead by Mexican Marines in 2009, but also did little to achieve peace. Indeed, many believe that such tactics only served to pulverize the world of organized crime, creating even more violence as new, less predictable factions disputed their share of the pie.
Under Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, the government’s rhetoric about crime softened as Mexico sought to relinquish its reputation as the headquarters of some of the world’s most murderous mafia groups.
But Calderón’s policies largely survived, with authorities targeting prominent cartel leaders such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán of Sinaloa.
When “El Chapo” was arrested in early 2016, the President of Mexico boasted: “Mission accomplished.” But the violence continued. When Peña Nieto left office in 2018, Mexico had suffered another record-breaking year of killings, with nearly 36,000 people killed.
“Hugs, not bullets”
Left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in December, promising a dramatic change in tactics. López Obrador, or Amlo as most call him, promised to attack the social roots of crime, offering vocational training to more than 2.3 million disadvantaged youth at risk of being caught by the cartels.
“It will be practically impossible to achieve peace without justice and [social] well-being, “Amlo said, vowing to reduce the murder rate from an average of 89 murders per day with his” hug, not bullet “doctrine.
Amlo also pledged to chair the security meetings daily at 6 am and create a strong “National Guard” of 60,000. But those measures have yet to pay off, with the new security force used primarily to hunt down Central American migrants.
Mexico now suffers an average of approximately 96 murders per day, with almost 29,000 people killed since Amlo took office.
Mexican drug gangs have often attacked such facilities in the past, aiming to kill suspected street-level traffickers of rival gangs. The Irapuato massacre was one of the deadliest attacks on a rehabilitation center since 19 people died in 2010 in the city of Chihuahua in northern Mexico. Since then there have been more than a dozen attacks on such facilities.
Mexico has long struggled with rehab centers because most are private, underfunded, and often abuse abuses in recovery. The government spends relatively little money on rehabilitation, often making unregistered centers the only option available to poor families.
Additionally, addicts and traffickers facing attacks from rivals on the streets sometimes take refuge in rehab clinics, making the clinics the target of attacks. Other gangs have been accused of forcibly recruiting recovering addicts in the centers as traffickers and of killing them if they refused.
.
