Shock in Mexico from the images of the murder of 5 young people

Many in Mexico, a country where extreme violence has become commonplace, were nevertheless shocked on Wednesday when footage appeared on social media of the murders of five young men who were kidnapped last week in the western part of the country. country.

Photo and video, which are being verified, show the youths, aged 19 to 22, who were kidnapped in the state of Jalisco, a stronghold of drug-trafficking gangs.

The photo shows the five youths kneeling, their hands tied; in the video, one of them is being attacked with a knife, while the others are already lying on the ground.

The video of the moment in which one of the five missing persons in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, was killed with a stone has begun to circulate, we will not publish the visual material, but this is what happens in the .

In this material, Jaime is… pic.twitter.com/uKzwLXNBpv

— Blog del Narco México (@blogdelnarcomex) August 16, 2023

It is “obviously” a case that is “connected to organized crime”, judged Enrique Alfaro, the governor of Jalisco, via X (the former Twitter).

“We are faced with irrational, violent attacks directed against the stability of Jalisco, which require a reaction from the Mexican state,” he added.

A gruesome video circulated Wednesday on social media may have recorded the last moments of five kidnapped young men, and has transported Mexico back to the darkest days of drug cartel brutality in the 2000s. | @AP https://t.co/PV8xlv5v7D

— Inquirer (@inquirerdotnet) August 17, 2023

The families “consider that there are strong possibilities (…) that these are their own people,” said the prosecutor in charge of the investigation, Blanco Trujillo, during a press conference yesterday.

The prosecutor’s office yesterday excluded a farm where blood stains and shoes were found, which “implies that the five young people were there”, according to its announcement.

Two cars belonging to the victims were found, one set on fire, and inside this last body.

Expressing her mourning, opposition candidate for the 2024 presidential election and senator Sochilt Galvez announced she was suspending her campaign for 24 hours, as a sign of “respect for the families”.

Instead, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador avoided giving clear answers to reporters about the case when asked about it in his morning press conference, something he was criticized for on social networking sites.

More than 400,000 murders have been recorded in Mexico since 2006, while more than 110,000 people have disappeared since the 1960s. Most of these crimes are attributed by the authorities to gang wars or cartel retaliation for actions by security forces. The violence took off in 2006, when then-President Felipe Calderon declared “war” on drug cartels, deploying the military inside the country.