According to Mexico’s president, the murder of two utility employees in northern Mexico may be tied to the bloody methods used by rival drug gangs.
In their territory wars, drug gangs in Mexico are increasingly focusing on civilian populations, shutting off roads and power to towns that don’t support them, or evicting citizens.
On a motorway on Tuesday, gunmen opened fire on two vehicles transporting employees from the state-owned electric power business. Two employees died and two managed to get away.
The territory in the northern border state of Sonora was the site of violence between gangs, who had cut power to two communities as “retaliation,” according to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Thursday.
López Obrador described the region around the attack’s target, the community of Onavas, as having “conflict between parties there.”
However, López Obrador added that “there is another hypothesis that suggests they were performing their duties by going to reconnect electricity to two villages that had been cut off by one of the groups as retaliation.” He suggested that the attackers may have mistaken the utility trucks for those of a rival gang.
Warring drug gangs in Michoacan, a state in western Mexico, have sometimes blocked off communities that seem to favour a rival group by bringing down power lines or building trenches across roads.
The assault on Tuesday, however, was exceptional since up to this point, cartels have usually refrained from attacking public employees who are seeking to reconnect roads or electrical lines. Additionally, one of López Obrador’s key policy goals has been to revive the Federal Electricity Commission, a state-owned company that is heavily in debt.
Drug organisations have been warring for years over the lucrative drug-producing and shipping zones of Sonora state, notably the La Linea gang headquartered in Ciudad Juarez and parts of the Sinaloa cartel.
The ambush killings of nine dual citizens from the United States and Mexico in 2019 in a rural location close to Onavas may have been influenced by the cartel war.
On November 4, 2019, a group of assassins from a suspected drug gang attacked and killed the three women and six children from the extended Langford, LeBaron, and Miller families.
According to preliminary findings, a group of assassins from the La Linea gang planned the ambush to target and murder members of the rival cartel. The attackers must have known who they were murdering at some point, according to the victims’ family, who assert this.
13-year-old Devin Langford was able to conceal six other siblings in adjacent bushes by covering them with branches after his mother and two brothers were fatally murdered. Then he made a 14-mile rescue trek. McKenzie, his 9-year-old sister, suffered an arm graze. Before eventually coming across rescuers, she trekked for four hours in the dark.
A federal court in North Dakota ordered in July that the cartel accused of carrying out the horrific murders must compensate the victims $4.6 billion.