Federal Security Minister Omar García Harfuch said Tuesday that four people arrested in connection with the abduction of 10 mining company workers in Sinaloa last month told authorities that the victims were mistaken for members of a rival cartel faction.
In recent days, authorities located 10 bodies on a property in Concordia, Sinaloa, the same municipality where the employees of Canadian mining company Vizsla Silver were abducted on Jan. 23.
To date, five of the bodies have been identified as belonging to missing miners.
At President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Tuesday morning press conference, a reporter asked officials whether they had information about the motive of the crime allegedly committed by members of the Los Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel.
“With the first arrests that the army carried out, of four people allegedly responsible for the abduction, what they say is that [the victims] were mistaken … with members of an opposing group,” García Harfuch said.
“Those are the first statements [of the people detained]. We’re going to have more information and of course we’re going to have more people arrested,” he said.
García Harfuch told reporters that the four people arrested are “from the cell of Los Chapitos,” and noted that that faction of the Sinaloa Cartel is engaged in a “fight” with the Los Mayos faction of the same criminal group.
Los Chapitos is controlled by the sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera. Its long-running battle with Los Mayos intensified after the leader of that faction, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, was arrested in the United States in July 2024 after he was allegedly kidnapped and forced onto a U.S.-bound private plane by Joaquín Guzmán López, one of Guzmán Loera’s sons.
The 10 employees of Vizsla Silver went missing last month from a housing development near the company’s silver-gold Panuco project in Concordia, a municipality that borders the municipality of Mazatlán.
Vizsla Silver said in a statement on Monday that it had “been informed by a number of families that their relatives, our colleagues, who were taken from the Company’s project site in Concordia, Mexico, have been found deceased.”
“We are devastated by this outcome and the tragic loss of life,” said Michael Konnert, the company’s president and CEO.
“Our deepest condolences are with our colleagues’ families, friends and co-workers, and the entire community of Concordia,” he said.
García Harfuch: Vizsla Silver had not reported acts of extortion or threats against employees
Asked whether authorities had reports of mining companies being extorted or their personnel being intimidated or threatened, García Harfuch responded:
“In this specific case, we haven’t previously had a report or complaint that they had been extorted or that one of the members of this company was bothered by any criminal group. We didn’t have it on record.”
However, in April 2025, Vizsla Silver suspended operations at its silver-gold project in Concordia due to the prevailing security conditions in the area.
The company said at the time that “out of an abundance of caution,” it had “temporarily paused field work at the Panuco project due to current security conditions in the area.”
Vizsla Silver didn’t specify the nature of the security conditions that prompted it to suspend work, but violent crime is common in Sinaloa, one of Mexico’s most dangerous states.
One month and one day after it announced the suspension, the company said that it had “resumed all field work activities” at the Panuco project.
“With security conditions now normalized in the region we have resumed our on-site work programs at Panuco,” Konnert said last May.
With reports from El Universal, La Jornada and Milenio
