On Saturday, April 19, 2020, Guerrero state police killed four alleged hitmen in the town of El Naranjo, municipality of Leonardo Bravo. Between that day and Sunday, 13 violent deaths and two arrests were registered in the area after clashes between alleged criminal groups and the authorities, but the corporation only claimed the death of four people.
This was one of 157 armed clashes that Guerrero police recorded between 2018 and 2021, one every ten days. They killed 94 alleged attackers and 19 uniformed personnel. This makes Guerrero one of the deadliest bodies of state corporations: every two weeks for four years, an alleged armed civilian lost his life in confrontation with the agents.
The other two states with the highest death rates in clashes between police and civilians are Veracruz and Zacatecas. The first recorded 112 deaths since 2018, but with 338 clashes in which 16 uniformed personnel died. That is, its agents confronted alleged criminals once every three days and caused a casualty every nine. Córdoba appears as the main red light of the state, with 18 clashes in three years and with tragic events such as the incidents of February 2020, when armed men attacked a police station and various endowments: two state, two municipal and three of the alleged attackers died. Veracruz is the state in which the highest number of armed clashes were recorded between alleged members of organized crime and police.
Zacatecas has relatively low but also significant figures. In the last three years, there have been 140 clashes in which 66 alleged attackers and 36 police officers were killed. That is, armed clashes were recorded every eight days and every 16 an attacker died. Here, on the contrary, the number of uniformed personnel killed by attacking bullets skyrockets: every month a state official lost his life in clashes with alleged criminals.
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Opacity in Tamaulipas or Baja California
These are some of the revelations of the transparency requests made by Animal Político, which asked the 31 states of the federation to know how many armed clashes their police had maintained since 2006, how many attackers died or were injured and how many casualties the corporation suffered. This allows us to have a perspective on the violence registered in the different territories since Felipe Calderón declared, 15 years ago, the so-called “war on drug trafficking”. Although the first relevant data is opacity: only 15 states (Aguascalientes, Coahuila, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, Nayarit, Nuevo León, San Luis Potosí, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tlaxcala, Veracruz and Zacatecas) said they had this information and in most cases it was limited to recent years.
Others, such as Baja California or Yucatan, simply did not respond. Some, such as Quintana Roo or Guanajuato, claimed to have no data while in Tamaulipas, the Secretariat of Citizen Security said it was not “competent” to offer information about the confrontations of its agents and the casualties caused by them. Among the states that did not respond are some of those that lead the homicide statistics, such as Guanajuato or Baja California, and also others such as Tamaulipas where the presence of organized crime makes confrontations habitual and whose police have been singled out for human rights violations.
From the data that Animal Político was able to collect, it is clear that between 2018 and 2021 there were 812 armed clashes in 15 states of the Republic, with a balance of 464 armed civilians killed and 210 police. That is, for every agent killed, the uniformed killed two attackers. However, this figure is not exact, since there are states where the lethality of the police is very high, as in the case of Guerrero, and others such as Sinaloa or Michoacán in which there is a balance between the number of victims caused by the attackers and by the police.
Between Guerrero, Veracruz and Zacatecas, there are 272 deaths of alleged attackers, which represents more than half of the states that offered their data. This proportion is lower if we refer to the agents killed: 64 of the 210 registered died in these three states.
Coahuila and Michoacán are two states with a high number of clashes and civilians and police killed. In the case of the border territory, 51 alleged attackers were killed in 21 clashes with 8 police officers who lost their lives. In this case, the figures are increasedThey are very much for the 23 deaths that were registered in the municipality of Villa Unión in December 2019, when a group of armed men attacked the corporation, killing four policemen, and were subsequently killed by state police.
In the case of Michoacán, the figures show a greater balance between state forces and criminal groups. Since 2018, at least 34 alleged assailants have died in 63 armed clashes, in which 26 police officers lost their lives. In this state, the confrontation between the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG) and its rivals in Carteles Unidos capitalizes on the violence. However, there have also been massacres of police, such as the ambush in which 14 officers were killed in El Aguaje, municipality of Aguililla, in October 2019.
Read more: Three armed civilians killed in SLP during clash; a policeman dies
More police killed than attackers in Chihuahua
Chihuahua (24 killed in 14 clashes since 2020, with 36 police officers killed) marks an exception. It is one of the few states in which its figures say that more uniformed personnel died than attackers.
Behind is Jalisco, with 22 civilians and 11 police officers killed in 44 confrontations; San Luis Potosí, with 17 alleged attackers and 4 agents killed in 20 clashes; Sonora, with 10 aggressors and 14 police officers killed but without record of clashes and Sinaloa, with 5 civilians and 1 police killed in 22 confrontations.
The states with the lowest rates of civilians killed in clashes with authorities are Aguascalientes, where one person was killed, by ten police officers; and Chiapas, with another civilian and two other police officers killed since 2018.
The lack of information provided by the secretariats prevents a clearer mapping of deaths and clashes with corporations. In addition, institutions tend to reduce the number of deaths caused by their elements. For example, the Army went so far as to claim that in 15 years of the so-called “war on drugs,” its troops had only killed 43 people who were oblivious to armed clashes, although a review by Animal Político showed that victims of extrajudicial execution were included as aggressors.
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