About twenty men with balaclavas and assault rifles pointing to the sky look at the camera with a rural landscape in the background. One of them, in front, reads a paper. Next to him, a black sheet with the acronym CDS-MF serves as identification: Cartel de Sinaloa-Mayito Flaco, one of the factions into which the criminal group has split. In the front line, a man lying on the ground with a machine gun. This is the scene that the narco set up two days after the discovery, last Saturday, of 10 bodies in three different points of the State of Zacatecas, in central Mexico. Five of them were hanging from a bridge, semi-naked.
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The cartel wanted to send several messages, as if the massacre of 10 local businessmen and officials last Saturday had not been enough. They called it a “small show of authority.” In a two-minute speech, the group threatens “any citizen who seeks to demonstrate or is against our rules” with “ending up hanged or a little worse.” It also confronts the governor of Zacatecas, David Monreal, of Morena, the left-wing party that governs Mexico: “If you betray us in the pacts we have not only with you, but with all corporations, you and all your descendants will end up the same or worse.” And he adds this, referring to the murders: “For our part, we are complying, and as proof, there is what you entrusted to us.”
Beyond generating terror, the message is another example of the extent to which cartels are embedded in the social fabric of small cities in the country and how, openly, they intend to impose their logic in the places where they operate and on society as a whole. The preliminary investigation by the Zacatecas prosecutor’s office itself points to the “voluntary or coerced” participation of two of the murdered in an “extortion circle,” and also analyzes the connection of a municipal official, also murdered. The victims of the latest massacre were mostly businessmen – dedicated to mining, construction, event organization, the owner of a bar with concerts… – and two active municipal officials in the city of Fresnillo – one in charge of social development and the other, a civil protection firefighter –.
The state government says it is investigating the origin of the video – “it is a group supposedly from a cartel saying a series of nonsense with political overtones,” said the uniformed general in charge of security in Zacatecas – and has raised doubts about its authenticity. However, 48 hours after the message was disseminated, on Wednesday, the Secretary of Government of Zacatecas, Rodrigo Reyes Mugüerza, took the trouble to deny what the narcos were saying: “We categorically deny any insinuation that there is any pact or link with organized crime.”
Unlike the work that authorities have ahead of them to clarify the murders, criminals do not need evidence to provoke terror and explicitly break into local politics: it is enough for them to spread doubts with that challenging tone. Even if it were proven that the message is not from the narco, or that it is false, it has forced the state government to counteract it, in a country where the suspicion of links between organized crime and authorities has taken root and has even questioned past electoral results. The most striking case is that of the victory of the governor of Sinaloa, also from Morena, now temporarily removed from office after accusations from the United States of connivance with drug trafficking. President Claudia Sheinbaum has asked Washington for strong evidence before handing him over to US justice.
A large part of Zacatecas territory is desert and very sparsely populated, with 1.6 million inhabitants. Located in the center of the country, the State is crossed by a strategic network of roads where routes between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific converge, and those that structure the south and north, towards the United States. Drugs also travel along these routes, and cartels dispute distribution routes. But not only that. In Zacatecas, there are enormous deposits of silver and other minerals: “Criminal groups participate in several other businesses, there is silver, gold, lithium, lead, zinc… And they are specialists in extorting mining companies, which usually have transnational capital,” explains Raúl Benítez Manaut, a sociologist at the Center for Research on North America.
In Zacatecas, a faction of the split Sinaloa Cartel, Los Mayos, operates in the north, and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in the south, in a bloody struggle for control of the territory that kept the State among the most violent until a few years ago. “The exhibitionism of the murders, with hanging bodies, has the style of the Zetas, who controlled Zacatecas and were decimated by the Mexican Navy, although remnants may remain,” indicates Benítez Manaut, for whom the message they sent is a show of force that “they arrive with a lot of violence.” And he adds: “It is not normal for them to stand up like this. Next year there are elections and they tell the parties ‘here we are, we are very powerful and you have to agree with me’.”
Condolences and burials followed in the first two days after the discovery of the bodies. Eight of the victims died of asphyxiation and two from gunshot wounds. It is not known exactly what the sequence of the crimes is, except that they occurred between five and seven fifteen in the morning on Saturday. There were at least two meetings of two groups of three people. The firefighter was in one of them “circumstantially,” and another of the victims, a former mayor and businessman, was kidnapped.
The state prosecutor said on Thursday that there are indications that several victims were related “to an extortion network,” either “voluntarily or coerced,” stressed that there were no reports of extortion, acknowledged the seriousness of the problem, and encouraged reporting, to “have confidence” in the authorities to prevent it. The former mayor had reported in 2024, but it was for an issue “that was resolved,” said the government secretary, and was no longer active. On Friday, the mayor of Fresnillo, Javier Torres, from the opposition PRI, testified for three hours, whose testimony the prosecutor considers “essential,” although the content was not disclosed.
Governor David Monreal assured that “there will be no impunity” and that the process of “pacification of the State is irreversible,” he said on Monday at a press conference. “We will not return to that long dark night, to those not-so-distant times with executions one day yes and one day no; up to 65 police officers were murdered in one year,” he recalled. After condemning the brutality of the murders, figures and descending bars immediately followed: if in 2021 there were 1,741 intentional homicides and Zacatecas was the State with the most murders per 100,000 inhabitants (11.1), in 2025 there were already 149 and so far this year, 48. “It is a titanic effort,” said the governor, who came to power in 2021. The reduction in this indicator, according to the presentation, is 97.2%, but he said nothing about how disappearances and extortions have increased in the same period.
The federal government sent 400 soldiers to Zacatecas and this Thursday another hundred to reinforce security. President Sheinbaum has barely referred to the massacre in her daily press conference, despite the strong impact it has had on citizens. She has only said that she will be informed and that an investigation is underway, while boasting, in the same week, that July 21 was the day with the fewest murders in the entire country, with 21, in at least eight years. In fact, the president has praised Zacatecas’s progress as an example of success in the decline of homicides.
The 10 murders have shattered that image. “Violence was reduced because there was a pax narca, a mafia pact to maintain peace, not because of public security actions,” says David Saucedo, security advisor to companies and embassies. In his opinion, “someone changed sides in criminal governance, someone cooperated with another rival group to obtain benefits, because drug trafficking has no party, it can work with everyone in mining, agricultural activity, in works to launder money… And that video seeks to provoke panic. What is missing is to dismantle criminal networks, to arrest narco-mayors.”
Fresnillo, the most populated city in the State, with about 240,000 inhabitants, is the scene that connects the crimes. Most of the victims worked there, and in 2021 it topped the national list of cities with the highest perception of insecurity: 95% of the 240,000 inhabitants felt that way. The municipal government has suffered years of violence apart from the two officials murdered on Saturday: 15 days ago, a motorcyclist shot and killed the mayor of Fresnillo between 2013 and 2016, Benjamín Medrano, who had been Mexico’s first openly gay councilor. The previous head of Social Development, Juan Pérez Guardado, was also murdered and was the brother-in-law of a senator who is the governor’s brother. A nephew of both, an official in Fresnillo, was shot dead two years ago.
The governor of Zacatecas belongs to the influential political dynasty of the Monreals. Nine of his siblings have or have had political positions in Mexico: governors, senators, several mayors of Fresnillo, and other trusted positions in different administrations. However, Fresnillo is now in the hands of a coalition of opposition parties to Morena, from the PRI, PRD, and PAN, and it is in this corporation that two people have been murdered.
It is in this scenario that drug trafficking enters to further poison the situation. “In electoral periods, or as now, when it has to be defined who will control Morena in this State, violence erupts,” explains political scientist specializing in electoral violence Noé Hernández, from the Autonomous University of Zacatecas. “The video shows that criminal organizations want to destabilize that internal process [of Morena], that there is a rearrangement of their interests and to hold the state government responsible for these deaths,” he states. “In fact, it challenges the official narrative of the decrease in homicides with the murders and intends to accuse the governor of criminalizing the opposition.”