Nine people were shot dead including one youth in four separate attacks in the space of 72 hours during a bloody weekend in Guaymas, Sonora.
The Sonora Attorney General’s Office said that four people were found dead on Friday at the pier of the Manga 1 fish farm in San Carlos Nuevo Guaymas, a beachfront subdivision within Guaymas. Two of the men were later identified through their fingerprints, but their names were not confirmed.
On Saturday a man was shot around 7 p.m. in Fátima neighborhood and his body was dumped on a dirt road. Later on Saturday, at around 11 p.m., three men were killed, including a 17-year-old boy, in an attack in the community of Las Guásimas. Another three people were injured in the attack. A pickup truck with bullet holes and bullet shells from various weapons was found by police.
On Sunday morning at 5:10 a.m., a man’s body was found with gunshot wounds in the Santa Clara sports field in San José de Guaymas, an ejido, or communal land, belonging to San Carlos Nuevo Guaymas.
Guaymas is no stranger to violence. There were 55 murders in the city in the first four months of the year, the newspaper El Imparcial reported. The newspaper also said that the spate of killings represented a rise on the four month average: in 2020 there were 144 murders in Guaymas and 149 in 2021.
Violence in Guaymas hasn’t been restricted to remote areas or specific neighborhoods: an attack outside the Guaymas municipal palace killed three people in November.
The city had a per capita murder rate above 100 per 100,000 people last year, according to a study by a Mexican non-governmental organization, the Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice (CCSPJP). However, Guaymas remained off the CCSPJP’s list of the 50 most violent cities in the world because it didn’t meet the requirement for inclusion of a population over 300,000.
With reports from El Imparcial
