Witnesses said the shoot-out seemed like something straight out of an action movie: Heavily armed men swarmed a posh Japanese restaurant on Monday, where a former state prosecutor was leaving after a long lunch.
Jalisco State Secretary of Labor Luis Carlos Najera’s bodyguards returned fire and a gun battle ensued on the streets of a trendy neighborhood in the Mexican city of Guadalajara.
Fifteen people were injured in the attack and subsequent narcobloqueos — roadblocks made by torching buses and other vehicles to hamper police operations — left 15 injured.
Photo: AFP
An eight-month-old baby boy died after suffering severe burns in a bus attack; his mother suffered burns to 90 percent of her body.
Miraculously, Najera escaped with an injured hand.
He later told a news conference he saw several suspicious characters enter the restaurant and ordered his bodyguards to block the entrance with his bulletproof vehicle.
State officials said six suspects were arrested.
Even in a nation accustomed to daily tales of crime and violence — each seemingly more spectacular than the last — shaky video footage of the shooting quickly went viral.
“Terror in Guadalajara,” the front page of El Universal read on Tuesday.
Mexico declared war on drug cartels in late 2006 and deployed troops to neglected corners of the nation to curb their activities.
The crackdown has cost more than 200,000 lives, left more than 30,000 people missing and appears to be escalating: Mexico reported 2,720 homicides last month, a 25 percent increase on the same month last year.
It has also brought shoot-outs to the most affluent neighborhoods of cities such as Guadalajara, long considered a home to the families of drug cartel bosses.
The brazen attack, which sent bystanders scurrying on Avenida Chapultepec shortly after 5pm, was the latest in a string of violent incidents in Mexico’s second-largest city and the surrounding Jalisco state.
The attacks, which have included massive narcobloqueos — ambushes of police officers, and the kidnapping and killing of students — have horrified Mexico and stirred suspicions over whether authorities are unable or simply unwilling to act.
“Today Guadalajara is going to sleep with cars burning and a shoot-out in broad daylight on one of its most beautiful avenues, where previously there had only been people dancing, art vendors and couples strolling. Such fucking helplessness,” one Guadalajara resident tweeted.
At least 105 public officials have been killed in Jalisco state since 2013, including politicians and the state tourism secretary, El Universal reported.
Before becoming labor secretary, Najera worked in policing and later as attorney general, but was forced to step down after one of Mexico’s most notoriously violent drug factions, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, set Guadalajara ablaze with 29 narcobloqueos in May 2015.
That month, the cartel flexed its muscles in an ambush of a police convoy in which 15 officers were killed and the shooting down of a government helicopter.
“They’ve killed police chiefs, mayors, state secretaries — this doesn’t happen in a context where you have mere common crime,” said Francisco Rivas, director of the National Citizen Observatory, an anti-crime non-governmental organization in Mexico. “This happens in a context where you have organized crime, extremely powerful, that is controlling territory.”
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