The mayor of Uruapan, the second largest city in Michoacán and the hub of the state’s lucrative avocado industry, was assassinated on Saturday night during a Day of the Dead event in the city’s main square.
Carlos Alberto Manzo Rodríguez, who won the mayorship of Uruapan as an independent candidate and had urged President Claudia Sheinbaum to ramp up the fight against organized crime, was shot at the Festival de las Velas (Festival of Candles) in the center of Uruapan, a city of some 350,000 people that is known for violence.
Manzo, 40, died from his wounds at the Fray Juan de San Miguel Hospital in Uruapan, Michoacán Attorney General Carlos Torres Piña said in a video message.
The mayor, a former federal deputy for the Morena party who assumed the mayorship of Uruapan in September 2024, was shot seven times, according to officials. Gunshots can be heard ringing out in footage filmed in Uruapan’s plaza principal. Videos also showed paramedics attending to the mayor after he was shot in an attack that triggered chaotic scenes in the crowded square.
Michoacán Governor Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla said that the assailant was shot dead at the scene of the crime and the murder weapon — which had allegedly been used to commit other attacks — was recovered. Two other people were arrested in connection with the attack, in which a Uruapan councilor, Víctor Hugo de la Cruz, was injured.
Federal Security Minister Omar García Harfuch told a press conference on Sunday that Manzo had had a security detail since last December. Fourteen members of the National Guard as well as trusted municipal police officers were tasked with protecting the mayor, García Harfuch said.
He said that authorities were interviewing witnesses of the attack and would review security camera footage.
The security minister didn’t cite a motive for the murder, but pledged that “no line of investigation” would be ruled out as authorities seek to get to the bottom of “this cowardly act that took the mayor’s life.”
“… There will be no impunity,” said García Harfuch.
Sheinbaum condemned the “despicable murder” of Manzo, and conveyed her condolences to the mayor’s family and loved ones, and to the people of Uruapan.
In a social media post on Sunday morning, she wrote:
“Today I convened the security cabinet to guarantee support for Michoacán and ensure that there is no impunity. The territorial commanders of the army and the National Guard were in communication with the mayor and he had federal protection.”
Yesterday in Mexico, narcos murdered the mayor of Uruapan, Michoacán, Carlos Manzo, a critic of Claudia Sheinbaum’s leftist government. pic.twitter.com/vGdNBnZoUt
— BowTiedMara (@BowTiedMara) November 2, 2025
Manzo was the 10th mayor to be murdered during Sheinbaum’s presidency and the seventh to be killed this year.
Two other mayors were killed this year in Michoacán, Mexico’s seventh most violent state in the first nine months of 2025 in terms of total homicides.
Various crime groups operate in the state, including the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the Cárteles Unidos, an alliance made up of several organizations. Those two groups use drones and land mines in their fight against authorities and each other. Both have received military training from former Colombian soldiers, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Extortion against avocado and lime farmers is a major problem in Michoacán, while the state is home to the Pacific coast port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, where some of the precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels use to make fentanyl illegally enter the country. Methamphetamine is also made at clandestine drug labs in the state.
In October, the president of the Apatzingán Citrus Growers Association in Michoacán, Bernardo Bravo, was murdered.
‘The Mexican Bukele’
The slain mayor was dubbed “The Mexican Bukele” for his hardline stance against organized crime.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is credited with dramatically reducing violence in the Central American nation through his tough anti-gang policies and actions.
Manzo, who was also known as “El del Sombrero” because of his trademark cowboy hat, was known for his strong rhetoric against organized crime groups and his willingness to accompany security forces on operations against them.
His bravery was unquestionable, but the mayor — a father of young children who were also at the Festival de las Velas when he was killed — was not free of fear nor naive about the risks he faced. Manzo, who received various threats from criminal groups, once said he didn’t want to become “another one of those executed,” a reference to the many Mexican mayors who have been murdered.
“… I am very afraid, but I must face it with courage,” the Uruapan native said in an interview in September.
Manzo frequently denounced criminal groups for extorting growers of avocados and limes in Uruapan, a large municipality located west of the state capital Morelia and not far from the border with Jalisco. He even pledged to take “lethal action against local cartels,” The New York Times reported.
While he represented the ruling Morena party as a federal deputy between 2021 and 2024, as an independent mayor Manzo was critical of Sheinbaum and her administration’s efforts to combat organized crime, even though the federal government has been more prepared than its predecessor to face the cartels head-on. He advocated direct and forceful action against criminal groups, and was critical of the federal government’s security strategy, which in large part focuses on strengthening intelligence and investigation practices and addressing the root causes of crime.
“We need greater determination from the president of Mexico,” Manzo said in September.
At a public event in May, he declared that “if someone is opening fire on the civilian population, we are going to take them down.”
“And if that’s a crime, then we’ll defend ourselves in court. Or we’ll pay the price in prison,” the mayor added.
Carlos Manzo pidió apoyo para enfrentar al crimen organizado en Uruapan.
Así lo expresó en entrevista hace unos meses.
Vía @Radio_Formula
Más en https://t.co/BjdELZkpfR pic.twitter.com/Xtt71TxRnb
— Joaquín López-Dóriga (@lopezdoriga) November 2, 2025
In recent months, he used the national media to issue pleas for additional help from the federal government to combat violence and extortion in Uruapan and other parts of Michoacán. On one occasion, Manzo called on Sheinbaum to deploy federal forces to “clean the mountains of the people who are killing and extorting avocado growers and killing children.”
He said that the municipal police force in Uruapan was unable to match the immense firepower of organized crime groups, but he still instructed Uruapan officers to take up the fight against them, and even accompanied them on dangerous missions — a bulletproof vest strapped to his chest.
“I go out in front heading the operations that have to be done,” Manzo said in a television interview earlier this year.
“I could be at home, scared and hiding under the bed but I go out in front and have been in shootouts where we fight the delinquents,” he said, explaining that “you have to preach by example.”
The Uruapan municipal police had some success in their fight against organized crime during Manzo’s mayorship, seizing firearms and detaining a significant number of suspects, including the alleged local leader of the CJNG, René Belmonte Aguilar, in August.
Now, however, the local police are left without the leader who urged them to fearlessly confront violent criminals, his crime-fighting crusade — and life — cut short by a flurry of bullets that took his life in the main square of Uruapan, even as residents lit candles for their loved ones who departed in years gone by.
With reports from El País, Milenio, La Jornada, N+, Infobae, CNN en español, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal
That was not hard to see coming. Big loss to the community and devastating to the family. Already sick of the political propaganda being spewed by the opposition.