Mexico | The mayor drove alone to the lands of the gang members, the head was found on the platform of the car – The new president: “The drug war will not return”

Mayor Alejandro Arcos Catalán was only in office for six days when last Sunday he drove alone to the lands of a criminal gang.

“Without security men, without a driver,” Mexico’s security minister Omar García Harfuch told at the press conference on Tuesday.

According to the minister, the mayor had not asked for protection from his superiors, but according to information presented in the Mexican media, just two days before his murder, in a radio interview, he had appealed to the state and federal authorities for protection.

Mayor Arcos led had been elected in June elections to lead Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero state, with a population of 300,000.

At 9 a.m. Sunday morning, he set out to tour the countryside around the city to survey the devastation of Hurricane John, which ravaged southern Mexico in September. He posted pictures of his trip on social media.

Petaquillas, where Arcos later traveled according to the authorities, is the area of ​​influence of the Los Ardillos gang. of the Mexican newspaper Reforma by the mayor had a meeting with the gang members. This information has not been confirmed by the authorities.

On the same day, around 5 p.m., Arcos was found killed in Chilpancingo. His body was in the passenger compartment of the pick-up truck he was using, and the severed head was in the back on the pick-up truck.

It’s about was already the third politician to be murdered within a week in the management positions of Chilpancingo.

Three days earlier, the head of the Chilpancingo City Council had been shot dead in the street, two shots to the back and two shots to the head.

Seven days earlier, the security director appointed by Arcos was shot dead in his car with ten shots.

Arcos had claimed in public that the criminals had not blackmailed him. However, the news site Infobae quoted a Mexican journalist of Héctor de Mauleón informationaccording to which organized crime would have demanded as much as 30 percent of the city’s budget from Arcos.

of Mexico the new president Claudia Sheinbaum took office on the same day as Mayor Arcos, October 1st. He has inherited the almost impossible task of defeating Mexico’s powerful cartels.

At the same time as the Chilpancingo killing spree, the Sinaloa cartel’s civil war has been raging in northwest Mexico, killing 150 people a month.

In the middle of this terrible news, on Tuesday, Sheinbaum presented his national security strategy, the primary purpose of which is specifically to reduce the violence connected to criminal gangs.

Sheinbaum emphasized that he intends to resort to even tougher measures, but to attack the root causes of crime and improve intelligence.

“The drug war will not return,” he said, according to the AFP news agency.

Mexico’s drug war was started by the president Felipe Calderón at the beginning of its season in 2006. However, clashes between the armed forces and gang members drove the country into a spiral of violence, where hundreds of thousands have died and tens of thousands have disappeared.

Sheinbaum’s predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador tried to return the armed forces to the barracks. He declared that he would fight crime first and foremost with social policy. The slogan was “hugs, not shots”.

However, López Obrador packed up and once again transferred law enforcement to the armed forces.

“I changed my mind after seeing the kind of problem I had inherited,” he reasoned.