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Heavily armed soldiers enter the area where more than a dozen law enforcers have died after their convoy was led into a trap by suspected drug dealers, carrying out a large chase of police, soldiers, marines and the national guard in Coatepec Harinas, Mexico , Thursday caused. , 18 March 2021.
AP
MEXICO CITY – Armed men allegedly led a police convoy into a trap in central Mexico from a drug gang on Thursday. eight state police officers and five prosecutors were killed in a gunfight, authorities said.
The massacre of 13 law enforcement officers in the state of Mexico was the largest single killing of law enforcers since October 2019, when cartel-gunmen killed 14 state police officers in an ambush and manslaughter in the neighboring state of Michoacan.
The Thursday ambush sparked a major search for the killers in a rural, gang-ravaged area southwest of Mexico City, which is surrounded on three sides by the state of Mexico. The dead law enforcers worked for the state.
Although the state of Mexico contains suburbs of the capital, it also contains lawless mountain and shrubbery such as the land where the attack took place.
Rodrigo Martínez Celis, head of the State Department of Public Safety, said soldiers, marines and National Guard troops combed the area through the country and from the air in search of the killers.
“The convoy conducted patrols in the region, precisely to fight the criminal groups working in the area,” Martínez Celis said. “This aggression is an attack on the Mexican government.
“We will respond with all violence,” he added.
There was no immediate indication of which gang or cartel the armed men could belong to. Several work in the vicinity of Coatepec Harinas, where the attack took place.
The city is near a hot spring resort known as Ixtapan de la Sal, which is popular with residents of Mexico City as a weekend getaway. But it is also relatively close to cities like Taxco, where authorities have reported on activities reported by the Guerreros Unidos gang apparently with the Jalisco cartel and by the Arcelia gang, which is dominated by the Familia Michoacán crime organization.
The attack appears to pose a challenge to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has pursued a strategy of not directly confronting drug cartels in an effort to avoid violence.