Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumEl Chapo: gun battles erupt in Mexican city after arrest of drug boss's son
Intense fighting has erupted in the Mexican city of Culiacán, where masked gunmen threw up burning barricades and traded gunfire with security forces after the arrest of one of the sons of the jailed former leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán.
Images shared on social media showed trucks with mounted heavy machine guns patrolling the city streets. Another clip showed a gunman with an assault rifle shooting at an unknown target against a soundtrack of continuous gunfire.
Local media also reported that at least one of the main roads out of the city towards the port of Mazatlán was blocked by a barricade of burning trucks, while others were closed by the army.
The battles raged for several hours before the security and public protection secretary, Alfonso Durazo, read a written statement confirming the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán López, one of the infamous drug barons lesser-known sons.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/17/el-chapo-violence-breaks-out-in-mexican-city-amid-rumours-of-sons-arrest
Mosby
(16,168 posts)Hell broke loose in Culiacán, Sinaloa Thursday where cartel gunmen went on a rampage in retaliation for the reported arrest of a son of imprisoned kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Gúzman.
The footage shared on social media showed vehicles on fire, carjackings, car bombings, snipers in the streets and explosions in the city of about 800,000 people. The cartel gunmen even had the audacity and the ability to set jail inmates free, according to various news reports.
The chaos erupted as Mexican security forces arrested Ovidio Guzmán, son of the drug lord known as El Chapo, whos serving a life sentence in the United States.
Under any other circumstances, Oviodos capture should be celebrated, but Culiacán's descent into a war zone shows the governments inability to rein in the cartel that many thought had been weakened with the arrest of El Chapo.
There were no early reports of the death toll. But chaos apparently reigns in the city that's almost smack center the state of Sinaloa, about 900 miles south of the U.S.-México border.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/elviadiaz/2019/10/17/gunbattle-breaks-out-culiacan-showing-cartels-still-mighty-strong/4015771002/
Eugene
(61,595 posts)Source: The Guardian
Andrés Manuel López Obrador said security forces saved lives by releasing jailed kingpins son after his brief capture in Culiacán
Jo Tuckman in Mexico City
Fri 18 Oct 2019 17.30 BST
First published on Fri 18 Oct 2019 15.08 BST
Mexicos president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has insisted that his government was right to release one of the sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, a day after his brief capture by the army sparked a wave of attacks by cartel gunmen who took soldiers hostage and paralyzed the northern city of Culiacán.
This decision was taken to protect citizens. You cannot fight fire with fire, López Obrador said in his daily press conference on Friday morning. We do not want deaths. We do not want war.
But the aborted arrest and the chaos that it unleashed prompted accusations that the government had simply folded in the face of cartel firepower, and cast further doubt on the presidents efforts to overhaul Mexicos security strategy.
There is nothing admirable about this decision, security expert Alejandro Hope tweeted on Friday morning. By launching a badly planned operation that was then badly executed, the government laid itself open to being blackmailed.
Carlos Bravo Regidor, a professor at the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics, tweeted: First it was an operational disaster. Then it was communications disaster. And finally it was a political disaster.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/18/el-chapo-son-ovidio-guzman-lopez-release-amlo