Is Guanajuato at a turning point?
A rare glimmer of good security news
Welcome to The Mexpatriate.
In tonight’s newsletter, I report on a recent drop in homicides in Guanajuato (you’ll receive another batch of news stories midweek).
This Easter Monday, the world mourns the death and grapples with the legacy of Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff. President Sheinbaum expressed her condolences and described him as a “humanist” who “chose the poor,” and whose death is a “great loss, for Catholics and for those who are not.”
Pope Francis said in a 2022 interview he hoped for Latin America “to achieve the dream of unity of San Martín and Bolívar,” but that the region “will be a victim until it can complete its liberation from exploitative imperialisms.”
I am reminded of a quote from Eduardo Galeano (clarion voice of the Latin American left) about the arrival of Catholicism on these shores:
“They came. They had the Bible and we had the land. And they told us: ‘Close your eyes and pray.’ And when we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
A day without murders in Guanajuato
On April 1, the state of Guanajuato had a zero-homicide day for the first time in years—how many is up for debate, but media outlets have reported it could be five or eight. Guanajuato has ranked as the Mexican state with the most murders every year since 2018 (recording nearly 20,000 victims in the last seven years).
Both the federal and state governments are taking credit for a 48% decline in homicides between March and April. However, the state had already gone from bad to worse since September, reporting over 500 murders in just the first two months of 2025. This recent downward trend could just bring the murder rate back to a grim “normal.”
In an interview on April 7, the federal security secretary Omar García Harfuch credited “important arrests” for the reduction in violence.
“There was a clear decline in homicides after [these arrests]…there were simultaneous security operations in Querétaro, San Miguel de Allende and Yucatán…These perpetrators of violence had ordered killings inside and outside Guanajuato.”
Nine suspects linked to drug trafficking, fuel theft, kidnapping and murder—including José Francisco Gómez Contreras alias “El Alfa 1”, leader of a Gulf Cartel cell—were detained during the March 20 operation. AM newspaper reported that the investigation began in San Miguel de Allende, where the Gulf and Santa Rosa de Lima (CSRL) cartels had operated under a “non-aggression pact.” As I wrote about in October, Guanajuato is a battleground for various cartels seeking control of lucrative fuel theft and extortion rackets.
The infamous leader of the CSRL, José Antonio Yépez Ortíz or “El Marro,” was arrested in 2020 and sentenced to 60 years in 2022. And yet, despite predictions that it would disintegrate without his leadership, his organization has survived. InSight Crime described the local cartel’s tools for resilience shortly after the arrest of “El Marro”:
“Originally made up of Guanajuato oil thieves who banded together in order to resist the encroachment of the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG), the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel (CSRL) is somewhat of an outlier in Mexico’s criminal landscape…The CSRL was arguably the first group to re-establish enough control over a particular area to fight back against a larger, more powerful threat like the CJNG. It did so by relying on two elements: a hyper-localized power base and an unerring focus on oil theft.”
Since the state’s first woman governor, Libia Dennise García Muñoz de Ledo (PAN), took office in October, the government reports that 820,000 liters of stolen fuel have been seized by the authorities. From September 2023 to March 2024, only 25,499 liters were seized. This dramatic increase comes amid a renewed federal effort to crack down on huachicol: an eye-popping 18 million liters were seized in March raids at the ports of Ensenada and Tampico.
The governor, who calls herself “a woman with clean hands,” replaced the state’s security secretary as well as the state prosecutor (both had been in their positions for over a decade) and has emphasized her collaborative approach with the federal government.
While the first day of this month brought hope, Guanajuato again surpassed every other state in homicides over Holy Week, reporting 38 from April 13-18—including an armed attack at a soccer game in Salamanca that left four dead.
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