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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.

His own officials said the operation had not been planned as well as it should have been.

“It was done hastily, the consequences were not considered, the riskiest part wasn’t taken into account,” Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval told a news conference in Culiacan, alongside Security Minister Alfonso Durazo, who called the attempt to capture the younger Guzman a “failure.”

Durazo admitted he and the military top brass were not aware ahead of time of the attempt to capture the alleged trafficker, calling it a bureaucratic error.

But the president defended the government response.

“Capturing a criminal can’t be worth more than people’s lives,” he said, adding that officials “did well” to free Ovidio Guzman. “We don’t want dead people, we don’t want war,” said Lopez Obrador, a veteran leftist who has advocated a less confrontational approach to tackling the gangs.

“We’re doing really well in our strategy,” he said.