MEXICO CITY — At least 14 police officers were killed in an ambush in the western state of Michoacan on Monday, a sign of intensifying violence between security forces and criminal groups in one of Mexico’s most volatile regions.
The squadron of state police officers received an order to enter the municipality of Aguililla, where drug cartels have long held significant influence. Just outside the city, four patrol cars were ambushed on a main road. “Several armed civilians fired on them,” said the state security department in a statement. Two of the patrol cars were set on fire.
The government’s public security secretariat wrote in a tweet that it “condemns the attack in which 14 police officers died in Aguililla, Michoacan. We are in communication and we will make available to the state government all of our human and technological resources to find the aggressors and bring them to justice.”
Violence has risen steadily under the presidency of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who promised to address the root causes of organized crime. Lopez Obrador pushed for the creation of a national guard, aimed at strengthening security in cities with weak local police.
On Monday, before news of the attack was reported, Lopez Obrador had planned to devote a morning news conference on the topic of security, touting his own plan.
“We are doing it in a professional way,” he said. “It is a new strategy where the fundamental thing is to improve the living and working conditions of the people, never again to disregard the Mexicans.”
But Monday’s attack once again cast doubt on the effectiveness of Lopez Obrador’s strategy. In August, there were 2,966 homicides in the country, the highest recorded number for that month. The national guard, for its part, now has 70,000 personnel, but many of them have been dispatched to Mexico’s southern and northern borders to deter migration to the United States, part of a bilateral plan with the U.S.
Alfonso Durazo, the country’s secretary of public security, said on Monday that Lopez Obrador had inherited a “chronic crisis of insecurity” from previous administrations. But the attack on police in Michoacan suggests that violence — particularly between criminal groups and the government — is deepening. The latest slayings mark the largest number of security personnel killed in a single incident in recent years.
The Michoacan state police officers had been instructed by a local family court on Monday to take a woman and her daughter from Aguililla to Morelia, the state capital, as part of a judicial order, the governor of Michoacan, Silvano Aureoles, said in a news conference. State authorities said they were still looking into details of the ambush, which Aureoles called “cowardly.”
