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MEXICO CITY — Mexican officials on Friday admitted they had bungled the arrest of jailed kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s son, who they let go amidst shootouts with drug gangs in the streets of a major city, but the president insisted his security strategy was working.

Cartel gunmen surrounded security forces in the northwestern city of Culiacan on Thursday and made them free Ovidio Guzman, one of the drug lord’s dozen children, after his brief capture set off widespread gun battles and a jailbreak that stunned the country.

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The chaos in Culiacan, a bastion of Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel, raised pressure on President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office in December promising to pacify a country weary of more than a decade of gang violence.

Lopez Obrador has come under heavy criticism on social media and among security experts, who said that authorities risked encouraging copycat actions by caving in to the gang, and that retreat from a major city created the impression that the cartel, not the state, was in control.