The overflow of violence in Jalisco motivated associations of Mexican migrants in the United States to join the demand for the resignation of Jalisco’s Governor Enrique Alfaro, as well as the mayor of Guadalajara, Pablo Lemus.
The Migrant Movement, the Mexicans established in California, and the Council of Migrant Federations of Jalisco, which on October 23 sent a letter to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to express their concern about the violent events in the streets with the absence of authorities protecting the public.
“Because of the repeated demonstrations of incapacity, impudence, and even probable complicity in the face of the wave of violence in Jalisco,” the aforementioned organizations asked President López Obrador to, through legal channels, revoke the position of Enrique Alfaro and Pablo Lemus, who, they accuse, have abandoned their responsibilities.
The violence in Jalisco is reflected in the data from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System. During 2022, 20,722 homicides have been registered on a national scale, but most are concentrated in 50 municipalities in the country, considered to be priorities, including six in the state governed by Enrique Alfaro: Tlaquepaque, Tlajomulco, Guadalajara, Zapopan, Tonalá and Moreno Lakes.
Between January and August, the state had a rate of 16.27 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, according to data from the Executive Secretariat. Jalisco is in fifth place in absolute numbers, registering 172 homicides.
Meanwhile, Jalisco is the entity with the highest record of disappearances in absolute numbers, with more than 15,000 people. Behind are Tamaulipas with 12,000 and the State of Mexico with 11,000, according to data from the National Registry of Disappeared and Not Located Persons.
The violence in that entity has been the subject of wide controversy. In recent days, the Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López, assured that, when the opposition accuses the existence of “bloodbaths” in the country, the first thing that comes to mind is the states of Guanajuato and Jalisco, today governed by the National Action Party and Citizen Movement, respectively.
During a meeting with deputies in Mexico City, he was asked: “When these bloodbath terms are used, what is the first thing that comes to mind?” To which he replied: “Well, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, which have become havens for criminal incidence, and our commitment is that this does not continue to happen and help the governments of those states.”
One of the recent episodes of the wave of violence experienced in the entity was the shooting that occurred on October 21 at the Sonora Grill restaurant, in the Lomas Providencia neighborhood, in Guadalajara, which left four injured and three dead, among them Salvador Llamas Urbina, a municipal official of Puerto Vallarta and national advisor to Morena, as well as Fernando Muñoz Ortega, former captain and former commissioner of Puerto Vallarta.
The episode is referred to by migrant organizations, in relation to the fact that the sequence of events, shared by users of social networks, shows how a Guadalajara Police patrol is standing in front of the restaurant at the moment shots were fired and the police left the scene without taking action to protect the public.
According to the Migrant Movement, this fact forcefully exposes the omissions of the authority, because in the videos that circulate it can be seen that the Guadalajara Police flee at the time of the events instead of dealing with the emergency, hence that in the letter they consider that the state and municipal governments abandon their functions and call for their removal.
The overflow of violence in Jalisco motivated associations of Mexican migrants in the United States to join the demand for the resignation of Jalisco's . . .
