14ymedio, Mexico City, 26 September 2024 — “If they die, you die.” This was the threat a group of hitmen made to several Mexican doctors at a hospital of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), located in Villa Unión, Sinaloa. The doctors were forced on September 15 to treat drug traffickers with gunshot wounds after a confrontation.
The wave of violence that has plunged the state into a security crisis for more than 20 days, with 79 deaths, kidnappings and clashes, led the Cuban Embassy in Mexico to order the withdrawal of Cuban specialists who were in the town of Concordia, in the municipality of El Palmito.
Sinaloa Senator Paloma Sánchez Ramos, of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), denounced on Monday that after 15 days of fighting, the state has recorded 79 murders, 70 missing persons, the theft of 98 vehicles and losses of more than 5 billion pesos (almost 250 million dollars).
“They are not used to stress like this. The Cuban Embassy asked us to protect them and we had to do it that way,” said state Health Secretary Cuitláhuac González Galindo on Wednesday, in an interview with Espejo magazine.
The Cubans are part of a group of 32 specialists – 16 general practitioners and 16 surgeons, anesthesiologists and pediatricians – who had been sent to rural communities in El Valle del Carrizo, Choix, El Fuerte, Badiraguato, and Concordia.
González Galindo stressed that the Cuban doctors “were there (in El Palmito) and were among the last to leave the area.” The region, located in the mountainous area, became a ghost town due to insecurity. Last week, more than 50 families abandoned their homes and moved to Mazatlán.
The Department of Welfare and Social Development of the Mazatlán City Council confirmed to 14ymedio that 26 family units were located in Villa Unión and another 28 in Mazatlán, but the groups asked for “discretion” in light of the threats they have received from factions of the Sinaloa Cartel – Los Chapitos, made up of the sons of the famous drug trafficker Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán Loera, sentenced to life imprisonment in the US – and others, close to Ismael El Mayo Zambada, who are fighting for control of the state.
The medical centers in El Palmito and Integral had to close. However, those located in Villa Unión, Civil and General remain open.
Confrontations between Mexico’s armed forces and drug cartel hitmen have marked the final phase of the administration of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The spiral of violence linked to organized crime has left more than 450,000 murders and some 100,000 missing in Mexico since 2006, according to official figures.
In Sinaloa state, where the cartel of the same name is based – one of the most powerful and violent in the country – internal disputes within the criminal gang have resulted in dozens of deaths.
López Obrador, who is leaving office next week, has promoted a controversial campaign, with the slogan “hugs, not bullets,” that supposedly seeks to address the roots of the problem, such as poverty, rather than war.
On Thursday, nine bodies were found with bullet wounds at the exit of the tunnel known as Sinaloense, on the Mazatlán-Durango highway, in the municipality of Concordia. The state Public Security Secretariat also confirmed the blockage of the toll booths in Coscomate and Mesillas.
On the other hand, the agency reported the discovery of a clandestine grave in Culiacán, the state capital, where there were three men “whose identity is unknown.”
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