Michoacan's state security agency said on social media that three members of the state Civil Guard had died in the line of duty Sunday night. One of them, Cristal GarcÃa Hurtado, was a regional police commander. Local press reported that she had been decapitated.
"We strongly condemn the cowardly murder of our fellow Civil Guards, who, in the line of police duty, were cruelly attacked," the social media post said, which identified the other two victims as Itzel Madero Larrea and David de Jesus Espinoza Valdez.
The attack occurred on the highway connecting the towns of Patzcuaro and Uruapan.
The Michoacan state prosecutor's office, which is investigating, did not immediately comment.
Michoacan has been particularly hard hit by gang turf wars, with the Jalisco New Generation cartel fighting a local gang, the Viagras, for control. Thousands of residents have been displaced as organized crime experiments with drone attacks and improvised explosive devices.
The mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, said her 37-year-old security secretary, who was shot three times, survived and was out of danger in hospital. She said 12 people had been arrested and at least three had died: two male bodyguards and a female passerby who was caught in the crossfire.
Photographs showed the police chief’s bullet-riddled four-wheel drive vehicle and a road carpeted with spent casings.
Sheinbaum said it was too early to say who was responsible, but GarcÃa Harfuch blamed the ascendant Jalisco New Generation cartel for the attack. “Our nation must continue to stand up to this cowardly organized crime,”
Earlier this month, three farmers were killed by a bomb apparently planted in Michoacan. That came just days after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged that an improvised explosive device killed at least four soldiers in what he called a "trap" likely set by a cartel in Michoacan.
In February, two hopefuls to be mayor of the town of MaravatÃo were killed within hours of each other. At least six local politicians have been murdered so far this year ahead of the June 2 national elections.
One prominent Mexican journalist, Pascal Beltrán del RÃo, claimed the hitmen – who had reportedly carried Barrett assault rifles and grenades and been hidden in a truck – were dressed as road workers. He said the last time Mexico’s capital had witnessed such an assault was nearly 50 years ago, in 1971.
Mexico’s president - who has promised, but so far failed, to “pacify” a country that last year suffered a record 34,582 murders – expressed solidarity with the police chief.
“All of this is undoubtedly related to the work that is being done to guarantee peace and tranquility in both Mexico City and the country as a whole,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador told reporters.
López Obrador, a leftwing nationalist, won a historic landslide victory in 2018, vowing to end Mexico’s long-running and fruitless “war on drugs” and to fight crime with “hugs not bullets”.
But a succession of deadly, headline-grabbing attacks – including one last October in which cartel gunmen brought an entire city to a standstill – have caused that philosophy to be increasingly questioned.
