Arrested a former commissioner with ties to Los Ardillos for kidnapping officials in Guerrero

The Defense Secretariat reported this Thursday the arrest of Mario N, a former commissioner of the Tlayolapa community in Guerrero, for the kidnapping of officials. The detainee, about whom no further information has been released, belongs to Los Ardillos, a criminal group rooted in the municipal power of central Guerrero that has sought to expand its territory in the lower Mountain region over the last decade. Mario N is also a close collaborator of Benito N, El Oso, regional head of the criminal organization.

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The commissioner acts as a kind of popularly elected community representative before the Juan R. Escudero City Council, to which the community belongs. It is in that rural municipality where, in August of last year, a group of residents from the Tlayolapa community detained at least 40 soldiers and National Guard agents. The incident led state authorities to set up a dialogue table with community authorities to achieve their release.

But Mario N’s time in office went further. The now-arrested man also participated in recent months in organizing protests and blockades on the Autopista del Sol, in the Central Region of Guerrero, within the limits of Juan R. Escudero. Those protests were led by Daniel N, who was arrested last March by agents of the Guerrero Prosecutor’s Office in coordination with the military and state authorities for the same crime of kidnapping public servants.

Los Ardillos have sought to leave their mark in the area over the last ten years, during which they have turned the state into the center of a battle for territorial control. All this with a stronghold located in Quechultenango, about 40 kilometers from Chilpancingo. Four years ago, the then bishop of Chilpancingo-Chilapa, Salvador Rangel, stated that this quest for control by Los Ardillos was never based on drugs. The religious figure holds great power in these rural areas, and Rangel was then very close to Celso Ortega, leader of the criminal group Los Ardillos. “It’s not about drugs, because there aren’t even drugs here! […] Celso tells me, ‘not even the damn marijuana grows here.’ So, the issue is political,” he pointed out in that interview.

In May, Guerrero saw the waters stir again in the communities of Chilapa and Atlixtac, located between the Central and Mountain regions. It was part of that turbulent sea that has also affected other targets of the criminal group, such as the communities of Tula and Xicotlán. On one side in this expansion quest are Los Ardillos; on the other, the Indigenous and Popular Council of Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata, or CIPOG-EZ, a self-defense group trying to stop the advance.

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