On the evening of Friday, October 21, at the Sonora Grill restaurant in the Providencia neighborhood, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Morena’s national adviser, City Councilman if Puerto Vallarta, and potential candidate of that party for governor of Jalisco, Salvador Llamas Urbina, was executed. Along with him, the former Puerto Vallarta police chief, Fernando Muñoz, also died.
Urbina was also the director of the Puerto Vallarta drinking water and sewage service, as well as office manager for Puerto Vallarta’s mayor, Luis Michel.
The modus operandi was the same that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has exhibited in other successful political attacks. In broad daylight, and in view of the rest of the diners, the plan involved the actions of at least eight people who operated inside the restaurant and an undetermined number of hitmen who protected the attackers during their escape. Coincidentally, the C-5 cameras in the area did not provide information on the perpetrators and there was a withdrawal of state and municipal police during the shooting. This could be a clue as to how deep the cartel is embedded in law enforcement in Mexico.
Nine years ago, in March 2013, one day after Jorge Aristóteles Sandoval Díaz took office as governor of Jalisco, the CJNG left him a letter. In the letter, they asked him to name a “contact” that would unify the cartel with government authorities, and together they could “work” in peace. The CJNG offered Sandoval to pacify Jalisco and end violence if the government worked with the cartel. However, it was later learned that the governor received a telephone threat addressed to him and his family if the governor didn’t join the ranks of the cartel.
Seven years later, two days after the end of his governorship of Jalisco, he was murdered from behind in the Distrito 5 restaurant bar in Puerto Vallarta. At that time, about thirty armed men established a perimeter fence around the place. Other members of the CJNG carried out surveillance tasks from within. Aristóteles Sandoval, a member of the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI), was killed when he got up to go to the bathroom.
Subsequent investigations revealed that among the operators of the attack were the Colombian Carlos Andrés Rivera Varela, alias “La Firma”, in charge of the CJNG’s operations in Puerto Vallarta and the Guadalajara metropolitan area; Julio César Moreno Pinzón, alias “El Tarjeta” and Francisco Javier Gudiño Haro, “La Gallina”.
The following months were marked by violence. More than 100 police officers and public servants were executed in different municipalities of Jalisco. Sandoval’s Secretary of Tourism, José de Jesús Gallegos, was executed a week after he was sworn in. And in 2018, two years before Aristóteles was assassinated, the CJNG tried to end the life of the former state prosecutor, Luis Carlos Nájera, who was serving as Secretary of Labor at the time, again in one of the busiest restaurants in Guadalajara.
The attack occurred at five in the afternoon, in full view of everyone. Nájera managed to escape in an armored van that he drove himself. It was learned that a score of assassins had participated in the operation to assassinate him. More than 100 AR-15 shell casings were scattered outside the restaurant.
“La Firma”, “El Tarjeta” and “La Gallina” were also involved in the attack against the head of the Secretariat for Citizen Security (SSC) in Mexico City, Omar García Harfuch, in the exclusive Lomas de Chapultepec area, west of the Mexican capital.
All the cases mentioned had something in common: in each one the degree of control that the organization led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho”, has managed to obtain in Jalisco and in other states of Mexico.
On the evening of Friday, October 21, at the Sonora Grill restaurant in the Providencia neighborhood, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Morena's national adviser, City Councilman . . .
