The morning when Culiacán became a chess board again… but with bullets
Ah, Culiacán. The pearl of the humaya, the birthplace of the corrido tumbado and, apparently, the favorite place of some gentlemen to resolve their commercial disagreements with lead blows. In a display of criminal coordination that any neighborhood association would envy, organized crime decided to decorate two opposite parts of the city with doses of ballistic terror. The Ministry of Public Security, in its eternal role as body count, confirmed with a solemnity that borders on the comical the death of four souls and five wounded. Were these latter collateral victims or simple spectators with very bad luck? Who knows. The authorities, experts in the art of ambiguity, do not comment, leaving us all to play macabre riddles.
In the south, specifically on Ganaderos and Jesús Kumate boulevards, a couple of individuals in a Ford Ranger truck received a rain of projectiles that, surprise, turned out to be lethal. The occupants of the vehicle, who surely did not expect their morning trip to become their last ride, died instantly. Two other companions, with a little more luck (or maybe worse, depending on how you look at it), were only injured. The urban legend, or rather the unofficial version, suggests that the attackers were traveling in a white van, the favorite color to go unnoticed in any high-discretion operation. As expected, the area was filled with a deployment of federal and state forces who, in a gesture of pure efficiency, closed traffic. Because nothing solves a problem of violence like preventing citizens from getting to work.
And in the other corner, more lead and confusion
So that no one in the city would feel excluded from the festival of violence, a second act of this tragicomedy took place at the north exit, conveniently located near a shopping plaza. Imagine: shopping at the supermarket and, suddenly, a confrontation between rival groups becomes the main show. In this scenario, two more civilians passed away, raising the macabre count. The authorities, with that surgical precision that characterizes them so much, revealed that three additional people suffered gunshot wounds. The great unknown, the mystery that keeps public opinion in suspense, is whether these individuals were active participants in the shooting or simple bystanders who made the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Come on, the eternal philosophical debate of narcoviolence: victim or combatant? You decide.
Meanwhile, agents from the preventive state police, the Mexican army and the ever-present National Guard maintained a search operation that, to the trained eye, seems more a matter of protocol than of effective results. An impressive display of men and resources to basically chase ghosts in white vans. It is almost poetic: the same city that saw the birth of so many musical heroes of drug trafficking is the one that serves as the setting for these public demonstrations that territorial control continues to be a chimera. All this leaves us with a profound reflection, or at least a sarcastic comment: the only thing that seems to work with Swiss punctuality in Sinaloa is violence itself.
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