Fifteen Mexican police officers have been killed and five seriously wounded in the deadliest single attack on the country’s security forces in recent memory.
The officers’ convoy was ambushed as it drove along a winding mountain road in the western state of Jalisco on Monday afternoon.
The gunmen, believed to belong to the New Generation Jalisco cartel, reportedly used burning vehicles to block the road while they openend fire with machine guns and grenade launchers from the mountainsides.
Large-scale attacks on Mexican police and armed forces have been unusual in Mexico’s drug wars, which have killed an estimated 100,000 people over the last eight years.
“Shootouts with criminal groups are common,” said security expert Alejandro Hope, pointing to the raging battles often sparked by operations to capture cartel bosses. “What is rare is for government forces to come off worse than the criminal groups.”
Monday’s ambush produced the biggest death toll since 2010, when 12 federal officers were killed in the neighbouring state of Michoacán in an attack blamed on the La Familia cartel.
It has also drawn attention to the security crisis in Jalisco, in which orchestrated attacks on the security forces and public officials have been escalating in recent months, mostly blamed on the New Generation Jalisco cartel.
Over 70 public officials, including police, have reportedly been killed in Jalisco since 2013.
The state’s public security commissioner said Monday’s ambush was retaliation for recent law enforcement successes. “It was a reaction to the detentions and actions that we have carried out against organized crime,” Alejandro Solorio told Radio Fórmula.
Solorio pointed to the detention of 15 people allegedly linked to a failed attempt to kill him on 30 March. In that attack large trucks were used to block the road while the assassins opened at Solorio with a 50 calibre rifle.
That attack, he said, was itself a retaliation for a the death of a local cartel boss called Heriberto Acevedo, alias ‘El Gringo’, who was killed in a shootout with police on 23 March.
The New Generation Jalisco Cartel was also blamed for an attack on 19 March that killed five Federal Police.
The cartel emerged in 2010, when an offshoot of the Sinaloa cartel combined with existing local groups. It is currently said to have an important role in the production and trafficking of methamphetamines, and appears to be one of the few Mexican trafficking groups that, along with the Sinaloa cartel, is bucking a trend towards fragmentation of criminal structures.
While primarily focused in Jalisco, the group took on the Zetas cartel in a vicious turf war to control the port city of Veracruz on the Gulf coast in 2011. During that conflict, the New Generation was blamed for dumping 35 bodies on a busy street in Veracruz.
The group is currently said to be seeking to expand its presence in Michoacán, taking advantage of the recent collapse of the Knights Templar cartel which previously controlled the state.
“The New Generation Jalisco cartel does appear to be getting stronger,” Hope said.
Hope insisted that it was premature to interpret Monday’s ambush as a gauntlet thrown down to the Mexican authorities in general. He said it was more likely to be related to specific local dynamics, perhaps related to recent detentions or deals with members of the police that went wrong.