No day off. Nothing on vacation 2023 started strong in Ciudad Juárez. It is barely the fourth day of the year and at least 300 elements of the Army have already arrived in this border city to attend to security tasks. It is a crossing point for hundreds of migrants, those who are waiting for a chance to enter the United States, but also for countrymen who return to the jobs that allow them to support their families on the other side. The painful Cd. Juárez, that of john gabriel, that of his Kentucky Club, the place where the daisy was created, but also where the hundreds of cases of murdered women await. A few months ago, last August, this town experienced one of its worst days of violence: in a very few hours, more than ten people (including a minor) died in acts of violence in different parts of the city. That image of entrenched and injured employees inside a famous pizzeria reminds us of the country we live in. It all happened after a riot in Penitentiary No. 3, a confrontation between members of the Los Mexicles gang and Los Chapos.
And it is in this place that the year decided to begin: on the morning of January 1, after seven in the morning, an armed commando broke in, guards tried to prevent their entry, and in the response action they seized 27 long weapons, nine short, eight tactical vests, four vehicles, 84 cell phones and several doses of different drugs, in addition, more than one million 700 thousand pesos were confiscated that were inside a safe installed in a “VIP cell”, the Secretary of Defense himself Nacional could not confirm the reason for that money in that place: “We do not know if it is the product of the drugs that were found there…”, he said Louis Crescent Sandoval.
It would come as no surprise to anyone to learn that within that detention center the “authorities” work alongside the criminal gangs: “They had managed to get long weapons through vehicle customs. They had everything in their favor: among other things, a detention center without technology, without resources, without equipment and with a staff of 70 people per shift, who must be distributed to guard 14 towers, various areas, and 3,962 people —twice as many those allowed by the capacity of Cereso—…”, he said yesterday Hector of Mauleon. The “merit” is from the Los Mexicles group and its leader, a man nicknamed the net, sentenced to 224 years in prison for crimes of kidnapping and homicide, was serving a sentence in that place. In the past, yes, because he was one of the 30 escaped prisoners after the riot. A premeditated orchestrated action: it was visiting day, generating disturbances in the prison and in nearby points would be a distraction for the security forces. The escape from the net and other prisoners, thirty in total, would be something much simpler. So it was.
Day 4 of 2023 and we already have the record of one of the saddest and most violent days, a city and the demonstration of the scope of organized crime. Even so, yesterday morning we heard the Palace tenant again: “The national security strategy has given results…”.