Biggest official death toll yet from a confrontation involving Mexican security forces in the country’s near decade-long drug wars

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A fierce three-hour confrontation between federal forces and drug cartel gunmen hauled up inside a ranch in western Mexico killed at least 42 “presumed criminals” and one police officer, according to the government.

This is the biggest official death toll yet from a confrontation involving Mexican security forces in the country’s near decade-long drug wars.

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National security commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said it took place within a major offensive launched earlier this month in the western state of Jalisco to combat the New Generation Jalisco Cartel.

It began, he said, on Friday morning after a convoy of soldiers, federal police and state police, came under fire from a vehicle full of armed men close to the ranch located a few miles over the border in the state of Michoacán, near the town of Tanhuato.

“A pursuit began that lead to the ranch,” Rubido said, “the rest of the criminals inside the ranch started to attack the federal forces with intensity”.

Rubido said federal forces called for reinforcements that included a helicopter.

The ensuing gun battles, he said, extended throughout the large ranch of 112 hectares and lasted for about three hours. The commissioner credited “the training and equipment of the federal forces” for ensuring there was only one federal police agent killed.

The rest of the criminals inside the ranch started to attack the federal forces with intensity National security commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido

He said the officer was killed while attending to a fellow officer who had been wounded. Rubido, who did not take questions from the press, said the operation also lead to the arrest of three gunmen as well as the confiscation of 36 assault rifles and a grenade launcher.

He added that six vehicles in a warehouse were set alight during the confrontation, which would account for the plumes of black smoke locals from nearby areas had earlier told reporters they had seen.

Photographs circulated on social media, and said to be taken from within the ranch before it was cordoned off by federal forces, showed the bodies of numerous young men both inside what appeared to be farm buildings and lying in fields.



In one image five lifeless youths lie beside farm machinery. One of them lies with his arms outstretched and with an assault rifle across his bare chest. Another, with no shoes, lies with a rifle on one side and an ammunition belt on the other.

Other photographs feature bodies in the grass, some of them with soldiers nearby. One image shows a colonnaded porch filled with blood-stained blankets, clothes and mattresses.

The area is close to the community of La Barca, in the state of Jalisco, where the authorities uncovered mass graves containing 78 bodies in 2013. The graves were also blamed on the New Generation Jalisco Cartel. The cartel is one of Mexico’s newer organized criminal gangs, formed in 2010 from the remnants of older groups that fell apart after their leaders were captured in earlier offensives.

The strategy pursued by successive Mexican governments of going after criminal kingpins has resulted in numerous spectacular arrests and takedowns and weakened several important cartels.

It has, however, so far failed to reduce the violence linked to organized criminal activity around the country that has killed an estimated 100,000 people since the drug wars began in 2006. Some once major groups have splintered into numerous small, and particularly vicious gangs.

The New Generation Jalisco Cartel is one of the few that has been able to take advantage of the power vacuums created by the waning of others to both become an increasing important player in trafficking drugs and expand its territorial presence.

In recent months the New Generation Jalisco Cartel has also garnered a reputation for particularly brazen challenges to state power.

Most Mexican cartels tend to reserve their fiercest firepower for their criminal rivals. In April, gunmen believed to belong to the cartel ambushed a police convoy travelling along a mountain road in Jalisco killing 15 officers and wounding five. There were no reported casualties among the gunmen.

That ambush was one of a series of attacks on security forces that triggered a major federal offensive against the cartel launched on 1 May. It was met by coordinated defiance, seen in dozens of burning blockades set up around Jalisco, as well as in some neighbouring states.

On the same day gunmen also shot down an army helicopter with a rocket propelled grenade, killing eight soldiers.







