“Char” for Borderland Beat
This article was translated and reposted from INFORMADOR.MX
By: Jaime Barrera
February 23, 2024 – 02:50 am
As will be recalled, the term “Culiacanazo” was coined after that black Thursday in the capital of Sinaloa, when Ovidio Guzmán, son of “El Chapo”, was arrested and released after a failed operation by the Mexican Army on October 17, 2019, less than a year after Andrés Manuel López Obrador assumed the Presidency of the Republic.
That decision caused a first scratch to the President’s popularity, and the beginning of the distrust of the United States that was revealed yesterday by the US newspaper The New York Times, by pointing out that after the case of General Salvador Cienfuegos, former Secretary of Defense during the last six-year term, who was arrested by the US justice system on charges of having colluded with drug traffickers and when he was extradited to Mexico, the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) exonerated him in January 2021, the US government initiated an investigation in which it could not prove the links of close associates of the President with organized crime groups.
It was the cost that the President decided to pay for all the errors in planning, strategy and military execution, which placed him, as he explained, on the edge of the risky dilemma of avoiding a bloodbath in Culiacan and buckling before the drug cartels or complying with the law and his duty.
Local police sources that maintain communication with U.S. anti-drug agencies assure me that their reading is that last Friday in Ciudad Guzman something similar to what happened in Culiacan would have happened.
Although so far there is no official version from the National Guard, whose elements confronted the armed civilians, state authorities only indicated that the result was a raided farm where weapons were found, a presumed criminal killed and an element of the NG wounded, in that violent day a week ago in which there were narco-blockades in the three main entrances to Ciudad Guzman.
It was never confirmed, however, what many journalistic versions unofficially reported in the sense that the violent response of this organized crime cell, which caused fear and anxiety once again to the population of Ciudad de Guzman, was due to the alleged arrest of a key leader of the New Generation Cartel Jalisco (CJNG) that operates in that area.
DEA agents, who worked in Jalisco until the Government of the 4T limited to the maximum its operation in Mexico, privately assured that such detention existed, but that they could not keep it, because the elements of the NG or National Guard were overcome and isolated from reinforcements with the blockades committed by the militias of the narco in that municipality of the Southern Region of Jalisco.
The municipal, state, and/or federal authorities would do well to confirm or deny this version.