The explosion of a car bomb outside a community police station in the town of Coahuayana, Michoacán, on Saturday killed six people, including at least three police officers.
Michoacán Attorney General Carlos Torres Piña reported on Sunday that the death toll had risen to six from an earlier report of five fatalities. He reported that seven other people were injured in the powerful blast, although the Coahuayana mayor said on Saturday that as many as 30 people were hurt.
One of the people killed was a man who drove the vehicle that was laden with explosives, while an accomplice also perished, Michoacán authorities told the EFE news agency.
The Michoacán Attorney General’s Office reported on Saturday that three members of the Coahuayana community police died in a hospital while they were receiving treatment. Some media reports said that four community police officers died.
Torres said that the vehicle that exploded was a black Dodge Dakota pickup truck that entered Michoacán via Federal Highway 200 from the neighboring state of Colima. The municipality of Coahuayana borders Colima and the Pacific Ocean.
The detonation of the car bomb occurred at 11:40 a.m. Saturday in the center of Coahuayana, the largest town in a municipality of around 17,000 people. The explosion caused damage to a number of other vehicles as well as nearby buildings, including the Coahuayana Municipal Palace.
FGR investigates
The Federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) said in a statement on Sunday that it was investigating the organized crime-related incident in coordination with the federal government’s security cabinet and authorities in Michoacán.
It said that forensic experts and federal agents from the FGR’s Criminal Investigation Agency were investigating at the scene of the explosion.
The FGR also said that its organized crime division, known as FEMDO, would lead the investigation. It didn’t attribute the explosion to any specific criminal group, but media reports suggested that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) was to blame.
Citing information from the Navy Ministry, EFE reported that community police in Coahuayana and the neighboring municipality of Aquila are engaged in a fierce “confrontation” with the CJNG “for the control of drug trafficking routes.”
The Michoacán state government doesn’t recognize the Coahuayana community police force as an official security force, as its members don’t have certified credentials, the newspaper Milenio reported. It is led by Héctor Zepeda Navarrete, a former member of the self-defense groups (autodefensas) that were created in Michoacán more than a decade ago to take up the fight against the Knights Templar cartel (Los Caballeros Templarios).
Car bomb explosion was initially called an act of terrorism
In a statement issued on Saturday, the FGR said it was investigating the car bomb explosion as a “crime of terrorism.”
However, the word terrorism didn’t appear in the statement the FGR issued on Sunday.
Earlier this year, the United States government designated six Mexican drug cartels, including the CJNG, as foreign terrorist organizations.
Explosion occurred 5 weeks after the assassination of the mayor of Uruapan
The car bomb explosion in Coahuayana occurred exactly five weeks after the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, was shot in the central square of that city, Michoacán’s second largest.
The federal government responded to the assassination and general insecurity in Michoacán — one of Mexico’s most violent states — with “Plan Michoacán for Peace and Justice,” a 57-billion-peso (US $3.1 billion) initiative that includes the deployment of additional troops, as well as various other actions.
On Nov. 30, the federal government reported that homicides in Michoacán declined almost 50% last month compared to both October and September.
The statistics indicated that the implementation of Plan Michoacán was having a positive impact on the security situation in the state, but Saturday’s car bomb attack was a brutal reminder that Michoacán remains a hotbed of organized crime.
With reports from El Financiero, Proceso, EFE, Milenio, López-Dóriga Digital and Imagen Radio
