At least two people were killed and another injured in a shooting that broke out this Wednesday south of Culiacán, Sinaloa. Among the victims are a former Sinaloa prosecutor’s inspector, Carlos Humberto Quintero, and an employee of the Tax Administration Service (SAT), Luis Enrique Beltrán, according to information broadcast by local media. The identity of the injured person has not been released at this time. The attack comes amid peak violence in the state, fueled by the internal war between different factions of the Sinaloa cartel.
The offensive occurred around three in the afternoon in the Nuevo Culiacán neighborhood, an area surrounded by seafood restaurants and brasseries that eventually became the scene of a chase. The three victims were traveling in a white car, according to information from the public prosecutor’s office collected by the media. Quintero remained lifeless inside the vehicle; Beltrán managed to run a few meters, although the shots left him lying on the ground in a brewery parking lot.
The third injured person was rushed to a nearby hospital by a private individual. His state of health has not been revealed. Officers from different security agencies arrived in the area and no arrests were reported for what happened. The newspaper Reform gathered, citing police sources, that Quintero was a former agent of the State Prosecutor’s Office, who had developed his career as coordinator of the General Inspectorate for Investigation of Crimes against Property and as former commander in charge of the commercial theft sector.
For the past year, Sinaloa has been embroiled in the bloody conflict between Los Mayos and Los Chapitos, two of the major factions of the historic Sinaloa Cartel. Culiacán took the biggest part in this confrontation, becoming the battlefield of this war, following the arrest of Ismael. Can Zambada, one of the criminal group’s historic leaders, in El Paso, Texas, in July last year. El Mayo blamed his godson Joaquín Guzmán López – Joaquín’s son El Chapo Guzmán – for creating a trap to deliver him to United States authorities, which sparked a confrontation between related factions. On December 1, Guzmán López admitted in an American court to having kidnapped the Mexican kingpin.
The violence that has spread throughout Sinaloa also reached this Wednesday the municipality of Escuinapa, about 90 kilometers south of Mazatlán, near the border with Nayarit. The criminal blockades reached the Mazatlán-Tepic highway, near the municipality. The latest reports from authorities indicate that traffic “has been diverted onto the open road”. “A coordinated security operation is being carried out by the corporations of the three levels of government in the aforementioned municipality, so that citizens can carry out their daily activities normally,” reads the letter shared by the Secretariat of State Security on the networks.
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