When Arnoldo Cuéllar kicked off his reporting career in Guanajuato in the mid-1980s, mass graves, decapitations and political assassinations were not part of his patch.

“It was a calm place back then,” reminisced the 57-year-old Mexican journalist.



These days, not a day goes by without grotesque chronicles of Mexico’s intensifying drug war clogging up the homepage and Twitter feed of the news website he runs, Zona Franca.

“I read the news that comes in and I say to myself: ‘This is not possible’,” said Cuéllar. “It feels like the government doesn’t care … there’s a total abandonment of leadership … like we are lost at sea.”

As Mexico prepares to choose its next president on 1 July, it is a sentiment shared by millions of voters up and down this violence-stricken nation.



Having last year endured the deadliest year in its modern history with nearly 30,000 murders, Mexico is already on track for an even bloodier year with nearly 8,000 murders in the first three months of 2018 alone.



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With the bloodletting showing no sign of abating – and a wave of deadly and brazen attacks on politicians adding to the sense of insecurity – those running for the presidency have paid at least lip service to making peace a priority.



Frontrunner Andrés Manuel López Obrador has proposed giving some criminals an amnesty and promised to personally chair security meetings at 6am each morning.



In a recent interview Jorge Castañeda, the campaign chief of second-placed Ricardo Anaya, suggested his candidate would ditch Mexico’s “totally useless” 12-year war on drugs and reprioritise the fight against organised crime so it was less focused on drug trafficking.

“Homicides are a direct product of the war on drugs – they are not a product of people killing each other just for the hell of it,” he said.



The most drastic proposal has come from the last-placed candidate, Jaime Rodríguez, who has proposed chopping off hands as a way of checking the violence.



Quick guide Mexico's war on drugs Show Hide Why did Mexico launch its war on drugs? On 10 December 2006, Felipe Calderón launched Mexico’s war on drugs by sending 6,500 troops into his home state of Michoacán, where rival cartels were engaged in tit-for-tat massacres. Calderón declared war eight days after taking power – a move widely seen as an attempt to boost his own legitimacy after a bitterly contested election victory. Within two months, around 20,000 troops were involved in operations. What has the war cost so far? The US has donated at least $1.5bn through the Merida Initiative since 2008, while Mexico spent at least $54bn on security and defence between 2007 and 2016. Critics say that this influx of cash has helped create an opaque security industry open to corruption.



But the biggest costs have been human: since 2007, over 250,000 people have been murdered, more than 40,000 reported as disappeared and 26,000 unidentified bodies in morgues across the country. Human rights groups have also detailed a vast rise in human rights abuses including torture, extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances by state security forces.



Peña Nieto claimed to have killed or detained 110 of 122 of his government's most wanted narcos. But his biggest victory – and most embarrassing blunder – was the recapture, escape, another recapture and extradition of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa cartel.

Mexico’s decade-long war on drugs would never have been possible without the injection of American cash and military cooperation under the Merida Initiative. The funds have continued to flow despite indisputable evidence of human rights violations.



Under new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, murder rates are up and a new security force, the Civil Guard, is being deployed onto the streets despite campaign promises to end the drug war. What has been achieved? Improved collaboration between the US and Mexico has resulted in numerous high-profile arrests and drug busts. Officials say 25 of the 37 drug traffickers on Calderón’s most-wanted list have been jailed, extradited to the US or killed, although not all of these actions have been independently corroborated. The biggest victory – and most embarrassing blunder – under Peña Nieto’s leadership was the recapture, escape and another recapture of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa cartel. While the crackdown and capture of kingpins has won praise from the media and US, it has done little to reduce the violence. Photograph: Pedro Pardo/AFP

Yet experts say not one of the candidates has come up with a convincing, detailed strategy to pacify a country that has suffered more than 200,000 murders since 2007. “It’s almost as if they don’t think it is important or are afraid of the topic,” complained Eduardo Guerrero, a security expert who has spent the last decade tracking Mexico’s soaring murder rate.



Few places need a plan more urgently than the state of Guanajuato, an agricultural and car manufacturing hub to the north-west of Mexico City.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Local tabloids announce the latest murders in Guanajuato state during the most violent week in its recent history. Photograph: Tom Phillips/The Guardian

By Guerrero’s count, the state – which until 2010 had one of the country’s lowest murder rates – became Mexico’s massacre champion in the first quarter of this year with 15 attacks in which three or more lives were lost. Last year there were nearly 2,000 execution-style killings, up from 51 in 2007. In the first four months of this year there have been more than 1,000.



The task of counting those corpses has fallen to journalists like Luis García, Zona Franca’s correspondent in Celaya, a city in one of Guanajuato’s worst-hit regions.

On a recent morning, the 41-year-old passed through security into Celaya’s bunker-like public prosecutor’s office for what has become a macabre daily transcription session at which officials divulge the grizzly minutiae of the latest killings.

There was, as ever, no shortage of news.

In the nearby town of Apaseo el Grande a missing teenager’s bullet-riddled corpse had been dumped. “She was 17,” the official said. “Her mother identified her as María del Carmen Rodríguez Mendoza … She didn’t have a job and she didn’t go to school.”

In Villagrán, the caretaker of a car wash had been bludgeoned to death: “Leonardo Galván Gallardo, 57 … he didn’t have any relatives, he had multiple wounds to the head.”



In Santa Teresa, a headless, limbless and as yet nameless corpse had been abandoned in a field: “What they found was a torso. No head. No arms … They found the skull about 15m away.”



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But the deadliest crime had unfolded just down the road, at about 4.25pm the previous afternoon, when a cherry-coloured Volkswagen and a white Nissan pulled into a petrol station. “Five people got out and opened fire,” the official said. By the time they had unloaded at least 50 shots into a group of diners, five people lay dead and three were badly injured.



“Is this a normal day? Well, yes,” said García. “It sounds terrible but for us it’s an unusual day when there isn’t any bloodshed.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Luis García calls his newsroom from the scene of a deadly shooting at a petrol station in the Mexican city of Celaya. Photograph: Tom Phillips/The Guardian

After punching details of the killings into his iPhone 5, the Zona Franca reporter set off for the crime scene – and for lunch, gulping down a plate of chili-smothered tacos at a food stand that had already reopened on the site of the previous day’s carnage.



After lunch he surveyed the site of Celaya’s latest liquidation.



“Bullet casings,” García said pointing to dozens of chalk markings on the concrete. “Blood,” he said, kicking his way through the gore-stained undergrowth beside the petrol station’s pockmarked wall. “You get used to it. When I started out [20 years ago], do you know what security stories were?” he asked. “Someone getting run over by a truck.”



Guanajuato’s governor, Miguel Márquez, put a brave face on the butchery, casting it as part of a global trend. “Unfortunately, the world is in crisis. You turn on the television and you see violence in Asia, you see violence in Europe, in Latin America … It’s regrettable that we are all living through hard times.”



Márquez said he was surprised by the spike in killings and believed Mexico’s next president needed to make the security crisis “a national priority”.

But law-abiding citizens were rarely affected, he claimed, since 70% of murders in his state were linked to a struggle between organised crime cartels for control of a $1.6m market in fuel theft.

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Mexican officials have often alleged that most victims of violence are involved in crime – an affirmation challenged by independent analysts.



“It’s a dispute between them,” Márquez insisted, boasting of his administration’s crime-fighting investments including a high-tech $150m command centre called C5i. “Regrettably, this dispute has created a bad impression … [but] the important thing is that we will turn things around.”

Yet even as the governor spoke Guanajuato’s mortuaries continued to fill as his state registered its most violent week in recent history, with 75 murders in just five days. It had been, one local broadsheet declared beside a graphic photo of a 19-year-old murder victim lying face down in a pool of blood, “a terrifying week”.



Back at Zona Franca’s newsroom in the city of León, Cuéllar was downbeat.



What did the future look like? “Bad,” he sighed.

“We’re in a mess and everybody thinks changing the President of the Republic is going to bring about a solution … [But] whoever comes in is going to face the same problems only with less experience.”



“Organised crime doesn’t have elections,” Cuéllar pointed out. “They’re always working on the same themes.”

