City where police in cartel’s sights
Celaya in Mexico is a very dangerous place to be a cop
Adead man lay on his back in the parking lot of a store in late February when journalists rolled in to the north-central Mexico city of Celaya to interview police. A spray of bullet casings and spent projectiles lay around the corpse, a sight all too common in Guanajuato state, which has Mexico’s highest number of homicides.
A policeman had been driving his wife to work on February 28 when cartel gunmen — who had apparently followed them — opened fire on their car. The policeman killed one attacker before dying. His wife and 1-year-old daughter were unharmed.
A week earlier, cartel gunmen had shot a police officer to death while she took her 8-year-old daughter to school. They killed the girl, too.
Welcome to Celaya, arguably the most dangerous place, per capita, to be a cop in North America. At least 34 police officers have been killed in this city of 500,000 people in the last three years. In Guanajuato state, its population just over six million, more police were shot to death in 2023 — about 60 — than in all of the United States.
As Mexico’s June 2 presidential election approaches, this city lies at the crossroads of a national debate about security policy.
Celaya has declined to follow President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s policy of not confronting the cartels, and ignored his policy of encouraging local people to seek out peace pacts with the gangs.
Mexico’s president dislikes police and would like to rely on the military for everything. He dissolved the old federal police, accusing them of corruption, and cut almost all federal funding for training and equipping local police.
Unlike some other cities, Celaya, a farming and industrial hub northwest of Mexico City, has refused to eliminate its local police force and then rely almost completely on soldiers and the quasi-military National Guard for policing. That means it has had to take on the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel, a gang so unreflectively violent that any sort of truce or negotiation was probably out of the question anyway.
“The Santa Rosa de Lima cartel controlled Celaya,” said Guanajuato security analyst David Saucedo. “The current Mayor, Javier Mendoza, made the decision to break the criminal control. It was a decision that cost the life of his son”, who was shot dead last year.
Now the cartel is trying to hunt Celaya’s cops into submission, or extinction. Two officers were killed in their car in Irapuato, the next town over, and the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel left a claim of responsibility. Killings of police in Mexico rose last year even as Lopez Obrador says overall homicide numbers have dropped under his Administration.
“The safety of the public is not something you can negotiate. Never,” said Celaya police chief Jesus Rivera Peralta. “These criminals have no values . . . we can’t negotiate with the devil, that’s impossible.”
Rivera Peralta said he is proud of the mayor’s slogan: “With everything, come what may, without fear”.
Under the president’s approach, Mexico has both a shortage of police — there are none in some towns — and, at the same time, thousands of experienced former federal police officers who chose not to join the militarised National Guard are now unemployed. Celaya decided to hire some of them.
Rivera Peralta, like most of his force, is a former member of the federal police. They’re almost all from outside Celaya. They live in secure barracks and go out only to patrol, earning the nickname “Fedepales”, a combination of the word “federal” and “municipal”. Because they’re outsiders, the new cops are less likely to have ties to the cartel, Saucedo said.
Most of the locals who used to work as municipal police have resigned, and it’s easy to see why. Estefani, a Celaya policewoman, narrowly escaped an attack as she drove to work in early 2023. The cartel apparently knew her route. “I stopped at a red light, and all I saw were two men on a motorcycle shooting at me,” Estefani said. “I was hit by three rounds. One shot went into the left side of my face . . . the bullet was lodged in my neck.”
“Right now, most of the attacks are coming precisely from motorcycles,” said a police officer. The attackers are usually young men, often carrying an AR-15 rifle with the stock removed to make it shorter.
Lopez Obrador would like to rely more on the military; he wants to hand over the National Guard to Army control — but at the same time, he doesn’t want troops to directly confront the cartels. The Guard doesn’t arrest many suspects or investigate crimes.
Opposition presidential candidate Xochitl Galvez is taking a different approach. She pledges to double the number of National Guard troopers but also restore training and equipment funding to local police forces. “We can’t have police who will take care of us unless we take care of our police,” she said. —AP