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or only in the port In Acapulco, the population is swept away by the incessant waves of violence, which have already totaled 200 dead so far this year, but also in the state capital, where uncontrollable gales have arisen due to the murders that have been carried out in recent days for the dispute of the square. On the morning of June 11, armed men stormed a chicken farm in the community of Petaquillas, on the outskirts of Chilpancingo, killing five men and a 12-year-old girl.
In the week from June 5 to 11, at least nine people who were dedicated to the distribution and sale of chickens were murdered in Chilpancingo. On June 16, around 9:00 p.m., Marco Antonio Contreras Meléndez, former prosecutor of the central zone, and Jesús Emmanuel Sandoval, former head of the Iguala Public Ministry, were murdered while driving in a van near the state government palace.
The gale also affected municipalities on the Costa Chica such as Tecoanapa with the entry of a convoy of at least 25 vans with armed men who opened fire on the municipal police facilities on the road to Ayutla de los Libres. What was unheard of was the inaction of the Army that verified the irruption of the armed men who burned down a house in the community of El Limón and murdered a gas station worker.
The most recent information from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP), registered 542 cases of intentional homicides in the first five months at the state level. In May 100 people were killed, ranking eighth nationally. Acapulco appears as the fifth city with the most intentional homicides in the country. Iguala is located in the 27th place.
In more recent events, this Sunday the 19th at night, Sofío Gutiérrez, the former interim mayor of San Luis Acatlán, was wounded with a firearm by people who came to his home. On Monday the 20th in Iguala, an employee of a tortilla shop was murdered by two people who fled on a motorcycle. That day, near the Nahua community of Tulimán, municipality of Huitzuco, another woman was deprived of her life when she was traveling with her family on the Autopista del Sol, by gunmen who intercepted them to assault them.
In the Low Mountain, in the municipalities of Chilapa and José Joaquín de Herrera, 23 Nahua communities that make up the Indigenous and Popular Council of Guerrero (Cipog-EZ) have denounced that since June 17 there have been constant shootings by the criminal group known as the squirrels. On Tuesday the 21st, several journalists who attended the press conference in the community of Tula, witnessed the rain of bullets exchanged by the entrenched groups. Families, panic-stricken, endure the torrential rain in their precarious homes. They stopped tilling the land and for safety they do not graze their goats. Territorial control is part of the temporary evil that plagues the region.
For more than six years they have faced these hurricanes that have devastated community life with 18 indigenous people killed and 19 missing. Guns have supplanted justice and imposed order with bullets. The agreements that the state authorities have signed are simple papers that are carried away by the gale. No one follows up on them. Their absence in the communities contrasts with the roots that the armed groups have in the territories. The alternative is to resist, dig in and wait for the state security forces to withdraw and disarm their enemies. Nothing has prospered because the checkpoints are temporary, while the storm passes. The criminal groups have taken root and there is no force to uproot them.
In Tixtla, on Tuesday the 21st, near the entrance to the Ayotzinapa normal, in the El Guamúchil area, two men were found shot, their hands tied and covered with a mattress. The bodies were thrown a few meters from where the municipal police set up their checkpoint to provide security to the population. Now any territory can be used as a dump for bodies or for clandestine graves. The territorial dispute justifies any crime.
The blows of these storms have dispersed on the two coasts, the mountainous area, the low Mountain, Acapulco, the central zone, the northern region and the client land with the proliferation of organized crime groups that in several municipalities have embedded themselves in the new municipal administrations. Security is subordinated to the group that controls the square and commercial lines are under the monopoly of whoever exercises destructive power in the region. Collusion with crime is the surest way to guarantee governability in the municipalities. The population has to align itself with the agreements imposed by the narco and he must get used to avoiding his life in the swamp of illegality.
The proliferation of armed groups in Guerrero is part of the new normality that has been implemented, despite the presence of the National Guard and the arrival of the new Morenista government. The nascent political configuration shows us the proliferation of these groups, which with their financial support managed to place several of their candidates in the municipal presidencies. Faced with these serious threats emanating from the same political power, a good part of the population prefers to remain silent and remain under the yoke of hired assassins. He is hostage to territorial disputes and criminal pacts.
The new hurricanes of violence in Guerrero are devastating because the criminal groups have acquired naturalization cards in the seven regions of the state. Their omnipresence has been normalized to the degree that they have imposed the gangster style of cacique and military repression, which the criminal state implanted in the war dirty.
In Guerrero there is an intense struggle within the communities, ejidos, and neighborhoods to prevent criminal groups from taking control of their territories and institutions. Despite the terror they have sown in the streets and highways, the people continue to be armored against fear, arming themselves with courage to face the hurricanes of violence.
*Director of the Human Rights Center of the Mountain-Tlachinollan
