It has been a bloody five days in Guanajuato: 46 people were murdered in the four days between Monday and Thursday and 13 more bodies were found today.
The homicides occurred across 15 municipalities in the state, and the victims included a five-year-old girl, two other minors and five women.
Celaya recorded the highest number of murders in the four-day period with nine, followed by León, with eight; Irapuato, with six; Tarimoro, with five; and Salamanca, with four.
Two homicides occurred in four municipalities; Pénjamo, Manuel Doblado, Jaral del Progreso and Apaseo El Grande. Six other municipalities recorded a single murder each.
In Celaya, the killings occurred despite the deployment of 500 military police to carry out security duties.
Five of the nine fatalities occurred at a street seafood stand, where three other people were wounded. The victims were the stand’s owner, an employee, the employee’s wife and two customers.
Assistant state prosecutor Israel Aguado Silva said the crime was committed with assault rifles and 9-millimeter handguns. Authorities found 55 spent bullet casings at the scene.
In Salamanca, a single gunman opened fire on guests attending a party at a car wash. A five-year-old girl and a woman were killed in the attack and a further nine people were wounded.
Four of the six victims in Irapuato, including a minor, were killed Wednesday night in simultaneous attacks carried out by sicarios, or hired assassins. Two other people sustained non-fatal wounds.
In Silao, a man was killed by a gunman on a motorcycle Tuesday afternoon in the vicinity of a campaign rally for Ecological Green Party mayoral candidate Guadalupe Corral.
Immediately after the incident, Corral uploaded a video to her Facebook account in which she described what she had witnessed and warned others to evacuate the area.
The newspaper Reforma reported today that authorities found the bodies of 13 more murder victims this morning in Salamanca and Celaya.
State Attorney General Carlos Zamarripa said that 85% of the homicides were related to “in one way or another” to petroleum pipeline theft.
Statistics released this week by the National Public Security System (SNSP) showed that there were 1,004 homicides in Guanajuato in the first quarter of 2018 or just over 11 per day.
That figure is only 419 shy of the total number of murders recorded in the state last year.
In response to a recent spate of violence in the neighboring municipalities of Apaseo el Alto and Apaseo El Grande — which included the assassination of a candidate for mayor in the former — 2,000 soldiers were deployed to the southern Guanajuato-Querétaro border area this week.
Source: Mexico News Daily