2 utility workers killed after warring drug cartels cut electricity to villages as “reprisals,” Mexico’s president says

The killing of two utility workers in northern Mexico could also be associated to the scorched-earth ways of warring drug cartels, Mexico’s president mentioned Thursday.

Drug cartels in Mexico have more and more focused civilian communities of their turf battles, isolating cities that do not help them by reducing off roads and electricity, or forcing residents to go away.

On Tuesday, assailants opened hearth on two vehicles carrying workers from the state-owned electrical energy firm on a freeway. Two workers escaped and two have been killed.

On Thursday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador mentioned the realm within the northern border state of Sonora was the scene of preventing between gangs, who had cut electricity to two villages as “reprisals.”

“There is fighting between groups there,” López Obrador mentioned of the realm across the village of Onavas, the place the assault occurred.

While he mentioned the attackers may need mistaken the utility vehicles for these of a rival gang, López Obrador famous “there is another hypothesis that suggests they were performing their duties by going to reconnect electricity to two villages that had been cut off by one of the groups as reprisals.”

In the western state of Michoacan, warring drug cartels have periodically cut off villages that seem to help a rival gang, by downing energy traces or digging trenches throughout roadways.

But the assault Tuesday was uncommon, as a result of up to now cartels have largely averted going after public workers making an attempt to reconnect roads or energy traces. Moreover, resuscitating the debt-strapped state-owned utility, the Federal Electricity Commission, has been one in all López Obrador’s most important coverage initiatives.

Drug cartels – together with the La Linea gang primarily based in Ciudad Juarez and factions of the Sinaloa cartel – have been preventing over the profitable drug-producing and delivery zones of Sonora state for years.

The cartel battle might have performed a job within the 2019 ambush slayings of 9 U.S.-Mexican twin residents in a rural space comparatively close to Onavas.

The three ladies and 6 youngsters from the prolonged Langford, LeBaron and Miller households have been ambushed and slain by suspected drug gang assassins on Nov. 4, 2019.

Initial investigations recommended a squad of gunmen from the La Linea gang had arrange the ambush to kill members of the rival cartel. However, family of the victims say that sooner or later, the gunmen should have identified who they have been killing.

After his mom and two brothers have been shot to dying, 13-year-old Devin Langford was in a position to disguise six different siblings in close by bushes, masking them with branches. He then walked 14 miles for assist. His 9-year-old sister, McKenzie, was grazed within the arm. She walked for 4 hours at the hours of darkness earlier than lastly discovering rescuers.

In July, a federal decide from North Dakota dominated the cartel accused within the ugly killings should pay $4.6 billion to the households.