Six police officers and prosecutors’ agents have been killed in a coordinated series of roadway bombs in western Mexico that officials said were an ambush set by a drug cartel, in the latest example of the brazen military challenge posed by organized crime groups in the country. Another 12 people were wounded in the attack late on Tuesday.
Jalisco state governor Enrique Alfaro said the trap in Tlajomulco, a city near the state capital, Guadalajara, was set when an anonymous caller gave a volunteer search group a fake tip-off about a supposed clandestine burial site.
As the police convoy accompanying the search party passed the ambush site, seven “improvised explosive devices” planted in the road detonated simultaneously, ripping through at least one vehicle. An eighth bomb failed to explode.
“This is a brutal terror attack,” Alfaro said at a news conference on Wednesday, blaming the deaths on an unnamed drug cartel. He said he was temporarily suspending police escorts for volunteer searches for the safety of the civilians.
“This is an unprecedented act that shows what these drug cartels are capable of,” Alfaro wrote earlier on his social media accounts. “This attack also represents an open challenge to the Mexican government on all levels.”
It was unclear if any of the volunteers were among the wounded.
More than 110,000 people have disappeared in Mexico in recent years, with more than 40,000 people reported missing since the current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in 2018.
Attempts to find the missing often fall to volunteer groups composed of relatives of the disappeared, who sometimes receive anonymous tips about possible burial sites. Such groups are often targeted themselves and often travel with heavily armed police escorts.
Alfaro did not say who he suspected of setting the bomb, but the Jalisco drug cartel has significant experience in using improvised explosive devices, as well as bomb-dropping drones. IEDs also recently wounded 10 soldiers in the neighboring state of Michoacán in 2022 and killed a civilian.
Earlier Tuesday, a federal official acknowledged that another cartel had used a car bomb to kill a national guard officer in the neighboring state of Guanajuato.
And on Monday in the neighboring state of Guerrero, protesters allied with yet another drug gang battled security forces, commandeered a police armored truck and used it to ram down the gates of the state legislature building.
The area around Guadalajara has seen bloody battles between factions of the Jalisco cartel, which was blamed in the previous use of IEDs in Mexico.
In February 2022, in the Michoacán township of Aguililla, a roadside mine damaged an army vehicle and injured 10 soldiers.
A few days later, another IED killed a farmer when he drove over the device in his pickup truck. The farmer’s son was wounded in the blast, which was apparently fueled by a device containing ammonium nitrate.
Special squads of Mexican army troops equipped with metal detectors and bomb suits were later deployed to the area. Dozens of such devices were found along rural roads and fields in the area around the township of Aguililla.
The IEDs included devices detonated by radio or telephone signal, by pressure – as when someone steps on them – or even by vials that break and combine two chemicals.
The Jalisco cartel has been fighting the local Viagras gang, also known as United Cartels, for control of the area for years. Those battles have featured the use of trenches, pillboxes, homemade armored cars and drones modified to drop small bombs.
The cartels’ bomb-carrying drones have caused more terror in Michoacán than the land mines. While initially crude and dangerous to load and operate – and still worrisomely indiscriminate – drone warfare has improved; it’s not unusual to see metal barn or shed roofs opened like tin cans from the impact of drone explosions.
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