What evil struck Salvatierra, a small anonymous town in the state of Guanajuato, in central Mexico, on December 17? Why were young people, who were celebrating the day before Christmas there, massacred? Indiscriminate killing? Links with drug trafficking? Mexico, although accustomed to homicides (more than 30,000 per year), remains in shock a week after this tragedy. We take stock of the events.
What happened ?
This December 17, young people are gathered in the San José del Carmen hacienda, usually rented for parties, in Salvatierra, which has 90,000 inhabitants. They are there for a “posada”, these meetings which punctuate the approach to Christmas in Mexico. Visibly happy to see each other again, there are around a hundred of them and they pose for the photo. Among them, a former beauty queen, a teenager, a musician…
Then the horror occurs. Individuals arrive on the scene and open fire. The toll is very heavy: 11 killed, aged 16 to 36, and 14 injured.
What are the avenues envisaged?
According to the Guanajuato prosecutor’s office, strangers wanted to force themselves to the party, but the group asked them to leave. Subsequently, the troublemakers returned accompanied by men armed with rifles. “That’s when they started shooting,” according to the prosecution, adding that 195 bullets were fired. A thesis of “revenge” which is “not enough” in the eyes of the president himself, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Security expert David Saucedo, contacted by AFP, suggests that one of the organizers of the party was the victim of extortion by criminal groups.
The Salvatierra region is controlled by the local Santa Rosa de Lima cartel, which carries out kidnappings, fuel and drug trafficking. And Santa Rosa de Lima disputes the territory of Guanajuato with the most violent of the Mexican cartels, Jalisco Nueva Generación. No link has yet been established with drug trafficking.
Why does this affair arouse such emotion in Mexico?
The diffusion of the photo of these young people shortly before the massacre, smiling, moved the whole country. The profile of the victims thus fueled the impression of “indiscriminate” violence, according to columnist Jorge Zepeda Patterson of the El Pais news site. The massacre suggests that this violence “can affect everyone”, and that it “transforms our children into a population at risk, subject to the law of chance”, he summarizes.
But there is also the president’s reaction which must be taken into account. Lopez Obrador was criticized after answering “yes” to the question of whether drug use could explain the massacre of these eleven young people. His reaction brought back to the table the question of “revictimization” – a term used in Mexico to designate comments that harm the honor of victims.
Two weeks earlier, he had linked the assassination of five students in the same state of Guanajuato to the fact that they were buying drugs from a dealer “in territory that belonged to another gang.”