The high-profile killings piling pressure on Mexico’s new leader

Gerardo Gama was outside his local shop one Saturday evening when gunmen emerged from the bar across the road, one firing his weapon. Gama dived behind a car. Ten young people were killed in the attack that shocked the city of Querétaro in central Mexico.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” Gama, 60, said of the attack last month in Los Cantaritos, a bar in the centre of the well-to-do city. “We’re all surprised, because honestly it was a very tranquil, very, very tranquil neighbourhood.

“If [criminals] have a problem with one another, the killers go for one or two, but this was incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it, how they were just spraying bullets.”

While Mexico’s overall murder rate has fallen slightly from its peak in 2020, the fragmentation and diversification of criminal groups has fuelled disappearances of thousands of people each year and brought extreme violence to previously peaceful areas. Attacks such as the one in Querétaro show that criminals have become emboldened.

Scores of different groups are responsible, but the biggest drug cartels that sell fentanyl in the US are in the sights of president-elect Donald Trump as he prepares to take office, along with migrant flows northwards that are partly propelled by violence in Latin America.

Trump has threatened Mexico with tariffs if it cannot stop the flow of drugs north, while many US Republicans want to designate the groups as foreign terrorist organisations. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Mike Waltz, was a co-sponsor of a proposed bill to authorise the use of American military force in Mexico.

High-profile killings as Trump prepares to take office have raised the temperature of the debate. In the north-east, factions of the Sinaloa Cartel have been engaging in daily battles. In western Guerrero, a mayor was decapitated in October days after being sworn in. The massacre in Querétaro underscored the enormous task facing President Claudia Sheinbaum and local authorities.

“The bubble has burst,” said local activist Waltter López. “If this happened in Querétaro, then no one is safe anywhere in the country.”

Security minister Omar García Harfuch said the Querétaro gunmen were aiming for specific targets from a rival group. Local media said one of the victims was allegedly affiliated with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), one of the country’s largest, which has expanded violently in the past decade.

The aggressors were reportedly from the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, a regional group that grew out of the oil theft industry and is based in neighbouring Guanajuato, the state with the highest homicide rate this year. Authorities in Querétaro have long tried to keep the violence next door at bay, but a series of incidents have alarmed the local population.

The historic birthplace of Mexico’s independence movement from Spain, Querétaro has been an exemplar of the country’s industrial development since it signed the North American Free Trade Agreement with the US and Canada in the early 1990s.

A vast expanse of white and grey industrial parks surrounds the eponymous capital of the state, which has 2.4mn inhabitants. Canada’s Bombardier makes aircraft bodies, Amazon Web Services is spending $5bn building a new data centre and millions of tourists swarm each year to its grand colonial-era town squares and aqueduct.

The homicide rate last year was just seven per 100,000, less than half the national average. But neighbouring Guanajuato — where global automakers such as Toyota and General Motors have plants — experienced a homicide rate of 40 per 100,000 people.

David Saucedo, a security consultant, said the violence was linked with the broader, violent expansion of CJNG across the country in the last decade.

“There is a civil war in the criminal underworld in Mexico. We’ve had an explosion in criminal groups dominating large parts of territory.”

In the warm rust-and-yellow colonial centre of Querétaro, families gathered in public squares on a Friday afternoon eating ice cream and listening to music. Nataly Servín, a 25-year-old who works in a fast-food restaurant, said she had long felt that Querétaro did not talk about the escalating violence to try to maintain its clean image.

“When I go out, I message my closest friends, I also ask them where they are, how they are, are they OK, we use an app and all have each other’s location,” she said. “I really don’t know if it’s safe or not.”

Sheinbaum, who took office in October, is under intense pressure to show she has a strategy for combating the bloodshed. Citizens consistently name the violence as the country’s biggest problem; Mexico remains among the 15 countries with the most murders in relation to its population.

Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose term ended in September, preached a “hugs not bullets” hands-off approach. That was a change from his predecessor’s tougher “war on drugs”, under which violence increased — but then murders and disappearances rose still more, to record levels. That did not prevent Sheinbaum, his chosen successor, from winning the presidential election in June.

Last month US ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar said López Obrador had closed the door to bilateral co-operation on security. But on a call with Trump this week, Sheinbaum said she had reinforced the need to work together.

She has continued to take a military-led approach to public security, placing the National Guard under the defence ministry while cutting next year’s civilian security budget by a third.

But she also appointed the former Mexico City police chief, García Harfuch, to oversee an investigation-led approach that conducted a highly unusual sweep of arrests of allegedly corrupt local officials this month. They also carried out the country’s largest-ever fentanyl bust, in an apparent effort to ward off tariffs.

“What we have so far is a Frankenstein, a collage with components of both strategies,” Saucedo said of Sheinbaum’s first two months. “Now we’ve had two Morena [party] administrations, so they have to give results.”

Responsibility for security is split between local and federal authorities under Mexican law, making co-ordination essential.

Following last month’s massacre, state prosecutors have detained two of the gunmen. Querétaro’s mayor, Felipe Fernando Macías, said the city had been closing bars failing to comply with rules, inspecting more vehicles and conducting police trust assessments every six months.

Outside the bar Los Cantaritos, dozens of candles and bunches of now dried flowers lay on the ground with photos of the victims, who were all in their 20s and 30s. Two municipal police vehicles guarded the entrance, with a bottle of tequila and clay mugs with straws still visible on the tables inside.

“There has to be a change of direction in the security strategy because this won’t end, it’s not just one case and then it’s over and we’ll be in Disneyland again,” López said. “We can’t have another Cantaritos, not here or in any other city.”