Weekly Report - 09 May 2024 (WR-24-18)

BC State Attorney General Andrade said the main line of investigation was that the two Australian brothers and a US citizen had been shot after resisting the theft of their pick-up truck. Their bodies were found in a well south of the port city of Ensenada. Three suspects have been arrested, including a woman in possession of one of the dead men’s mobile phones.

The state governor, Marina del Pilar Ávila, claimed that the perpetrators were probably unaware that their victims were tourists (a view not shared by those who point out that the pick-up truck had US licence plates). In a sign of her concern about the potential impact on tourism, she also maintained that BC “is and will remain a safe tourism destination for the thousands of people who visit us from Mexico and the rest of the world”.

Local human rights campaigners highlight that the authorities have moved quickly to resolve this, a high-profile case, with arrests made in 10 days, in contrast to the 2,700 cases of disappearances in the state which have remained unresolved for months and years. In a macabre link to those disappearances, the authorities confirmed they had found a fourth, badly decomposed male body in the well, but that it had been dumped there much earlier and was apparently not linked to the current case.

Kill teams

US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has told allies he intends to covertly send special forces to Mexico to assassinate the leaders of drug trafficking organisations (DTOs), according to sources cited in an article in the US monthly magazine Rolling Stone on 7 May, if he returns to power in January next year. Quite aside from the diplomatic tensions this would cause, the so-called ‘kingpins strategy’ of targeting DTO leaders has been tried before in Mexico during the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) with US support, and had, at best, mixed results since new leaders rapidly emerged to replace those who were imprisoned, extradited, or killed. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has already rejected proposals by US conservatives to designate the DTOs as terrorist organisations. He has also shrugged off other statements by Trump, attributing them to the US election campaign.

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