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2 more officers shot to death in Mexico’s most dangerous city for police as cartel violence rages: “It hurts”
Two police officers were shot to death in the embattled Mexican city of Celaya amid a wave of targeted attacks that authorities said Thursday were likely carried out by a drug cartel.
A total of 18 Celaya police officers have been shot to death so far this year, making the city of a half million inhabitants probably the most dangerous city in the hemisphere for police.
“This is something that worries us a lot, and more than that it hurts,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said of the attacks.
Authorities confirmed that gunmen opened fire on police in at least four different locations in and around Celaya on Wednesday. Police sources and the federal government said the brutal Santa Rosa de Lima gang appears to have been behind the attacks.
An employee of the 300-member Celaya police force who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter said that gunmen opened fire on three unarmed municipal traffic officers while they were setting up a checkpoint to check vehicle registrations.
Fernando Llano / AP
The employee said two officers died in the attack and a third was wounded and in stable condition at a local hospital.
López Obrador said the attacks have become brutal and indiscriminate, and blamed lenient or corrupt judges.
“Why bother the traffic cops?” López Obrador said. “Moreover, they were not carrying guns.”
The president said the attacks may have been related to a judge’s decision in June to grant a form of bail release to the son of the imprisoned founder of the Santa Rosa cartel. The son had been arrested in January on charges of illegal possession of weapons and drugs.
López Obrador on Thursday displayed a report of the attacks, indicating one set of gunmen attacked the traffic officers on a street in broad daylight. Soon after, gunmen hit another police patrol car with bullets, but apparently caused no injuries, and then sprayed a local police building with gunfire, also with no apparent injuries.
But police also came under attack later Wednesday in the nearby town of Villagran, 12 miles west of Celaya, reportedly wounding an officer seriously.
The Celaya police employee said members of the force feel they have not been given adequate support by the federal and state governments, and left the relatively small local police contingent to deal with the vicious Santa Rosa gang mostly alone.
López Obrador has cut off most of the federal funding once used to train police forces in Mexico, opting to spend the money instead on creating the quasi-military, 117,000-officer National Guard.
However, the military-trained Guard officers mostly perform routine patrols, not the kind of investigations and arrests that police do. Moreover, López Obrador is now pressing for a Constitutional reform to turn the Guard – currently nominally overseen by the Public Safety Department – to complete military control.
State plagued by cartel-related violence
Celaya is located in the north-central state of Guanajuato where more police were shot to death in 2023 – about 60 – than in all of the United States.
Guanajuato has the highest number of homicides of any state in Mexico, largely due to drug cartel violence. For years, the Santa Rosa cartel has fought a bloody turf war with the Jalisco cartel for control of Guanajuato.
In addition to police, politicians and civilians have also been targeted. Just last month, a baby and a toddler were among six members of the same family murdered in Guanajuato. In April, a mayoral candidate was shot dead in the street in Guanajuato just as she began campaigning.
Last December, 11 people were killed and another dozen were wounded in an attack on a pre-Christmas party in the state. Just days before that, the bodies of five university students were found stuffed in a vehicle on a dirt road Guanajuato.
The U.S. State Department urges American to reconsider traveling to Guanajuato. “Of particular concern is the high number of murders in the southern region of the state associated with cartel-related violence,” the department says in a travel advisory.
Mexico has recorded more than 450,000 murders since 2006, when the government deployed the military to fight drug trafficking, most of them blamed on criminal gangs.
AFP contributed to this report.
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Four space station fliers undock and head for Friday splashdown to wrap up extended mission
Wrapping up an extended 235-day mission, three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut strapped into their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and undocked from the International Space Station on Wednesday, targeting a pre-dawn Friday splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
With Crew 8 “Endeavour” commander Matthew Dominick and co-pilot Michael Barrett monitoring cockpit displays, flanked on the right by cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin and on the left by NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps, the Crew Dragon undocked from the lab’s Harmony module at 5:05 p.m. EDT and slowly backed away.
NASA TV
“Endeavour, departing,” called space station commander Sunita Williams, ringing the ship’s bell following naval tradition. “Fair winds and following seas.”
Left behind aboard the station were Crew 9 commander Nick Hague and his crewmates, cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov and Boeing Starliner astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Williams, along with Soyuz cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and NASA crewmate Donald Pettit.
If all goes well, the Crew 8 Dragon will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico at 3:29 a.m. Friday to close out a nearly eight-month-long mission spanning 3,776 orbits and 100 million miles since launch from the Kennedy Space Center on March 3.
NASA
The crew originally expected to return to Earth in September, but the flight slipped into early October in the wake of a decision to delay the Crew 9 launch from late August to late September to provide an eventual ride home for Wilmore and Williams.
The Starliner returned to Earth Sept. 7 without its crew on board because of safety concerns. The Crew 9 Dragon then was launched Sept. 28 with just two passengers, Hague and Gorbunov. That freed up two seats for Starliner commander Wilmore and co-pilot Williams, who will return to Earth next February with Hague and Gorbunov.
Sorting all that out pushed the Crew 8 departure into October. Dominick and company then were repeatedly held up by high winds and rough seas, much of it hurricane related, at splashdown sites in the Gulf of Mexico and along Florida’s east coast.
But forecasters expected favorable conditions Friday, and the Crew 8 fliers were finally cleared to proceed with undocking.
In the final stretch before the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on a three-state tour across battleground states to court swing voters — with a particular focus on those who backed former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary earlier this year.
Harris’ pitch was remarkably similar to the foreign policy warning about Trump that Haley delivered when she was a presidential candidate.
“If Donald Trump were president, Vladimir Putin will be sitting in Kyiv — and understand what that would mean for America and our standing around the world,” Harris told Oakland County voters in Michigan on Monday. Claiming Trump would surrender Ukraine to Russia, Harris added, “that is signaling to the President of Russia he can get away with what he has done. Look at the map. Poland would be next.”
As a candidate in Michigan earlier this year, Haley warned of the potential consequences of Trump’s failure to treat Putin as a threat.
“Once they take Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next,” Haley said. “Those are NATO countries that immediately put America at war.”
Both Harris and Haley also stressed the need to support American allies, denouncing Trump and Republicans’ views on an isolationism they say would move the U.S. closer to war.
“Isolationism, which is exactly what Donald Trump is pushing to pull out of NATO and abandon our friends,” Harris said Monday. “Isolationism is not insulation. It is not insulation. It will not insulate us from harm in terms of our national security.”
Haley criticized Trump in similar terms. “Look at the situation that the Republican Party is putting us in and that Donald Trump is encouraging — it’s this isolationist approach,” Haley told Michigan voters earlier this year. “America can never be so arrogant to think we don’t need friends.”
On Monday, Harris characterized Trump’s relationships with dictators as a threat to democracy, a point Haley also made on the campaign trail.
Trump, Harris said, “is so clearly able to be manipulated by favor and flattery including from dictators and autocrats around the world, and America knows that that is not how we stand.”
The former U.N. ambassador in January said of Trump, “You don’t befriend dictators and thugs who want to kill us.” She added, “When I was in the administration with him at the U.N., I literally had to sit him down and tell him to stop this bromance that he had with Putin.”
Harris and Haley may stand on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but Harris is tapping into their common views on foreign policy and America’s role in the world to help persuade undecided moderate Republican and independent voters in suburban areas.
In the counties where Harris campaigned on Monday across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Haley earned tens of thousands of votes during the Republican primaries — even after she dropped out of the presidential race. A senior Harris campaign official said the campaign believes this is an indication of suburban voters’ discontent with Trump. The vice president has been relying on Republicans to help make her appeal to these voters, including former Rep. Liz Cheney, an outspoken critic of Trump who has endorsed Harris and campaigned with her this week. Harris also hit the trail with other Republicans and former Trump aides earlier this month.
In 2020, Joe Biden won Michigan by less than 155,000 votes. In her race against Trump during the primaries, Haley won nearly 55,000 votes in Oakland County, Michigan.
Haley dropped out of the presidential race before the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin primaries, but nonetheless, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, Haley received 9,000 votes, about 24% of the GOP primary votes in the county. President Biden’s margin in Pennsylvania was just 80,000 votes in 2020, and it was even smaller in Wisconsin — a mere 20,000 votes. Haley received 9,000 votes in Waukesha County, Wisconsin.
While Harris tries to woo former Haley supporters, Haley herself is ready to campaign for Trump, despite her warnings about him months ago.
According to a source familiar with the planning, Haley’s team has given the Trump campaign availability dates for a potential joint campaign event, and the two teams are working to schedule an appearance before Election Day.
Last month, Haley told CBS News’ “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” she was happy to be helpful to the campaign if needed.
“To me, the stark contrast between a Trump and Harris administration are what led me to say, yes, I need to, you know, I’m going to be voting with Trump, and I’m going to speak at the convention,” she said. “Do I agree with his style? Do I agree with his approach? Do I agree with his communications? No. When I look at the policies and how they affect my family and how I think they’re going to affect the country, that’s where I go back and I look at the differences.”
In an interview with “Fox and Friends” last week, Trump said “I’ll do what I have to do” when asked if he’d be requesting Haley’s help, but he reiterated that he “beat her badly.”
