In Acapulco the vacuum caused by the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva in December 2009 was initially filled by a group centered around Édgar Valdez Villarreal (La Barbie). The arrest of Valdez in the late summer of 2010 and infighting among the members of the group, which by mid 2010 was calling itself the Cártel Independiente de Acapulco (CIDA), set the stage for the emergence of La Barredora in January 2011. La Barredora was formed by CIDA defectors who allied themselves with the Beltrán Leyva group’s historical rivals in Sinaloa. The resulting conflagration witnessed levels of violence not seen in Guerrero since the height of the Mexican Revolution. The violence was concentrated most particularly in Acapulco’s working class neighborhoods.
Installment 5 in this series includes homicide victims whose bodies were recovered along the 6.9 km stretch of highway between Cayaco and Puerto Marqués. The highway cuts through an area that has seen rapid urban growth in the form of middle class residential development with large pockets of more densely settled working class housing projects. In the accompanying map I have included only bodies recovered along or within a few meters of the highway itself. The total number of victims appearing on the map is 101, or one body for every 68 meters of highway. But the GVP data are incomplete through the key months of July through December of 2011. The fighting was approaching its peak during this period and it is likely that a dozen or more victims are missing.
Of the 101 bodies recovered on the highway, 95 were males ranging in age from 15 to 60. Only five were females, ages 25 to 36. (There is insufficient information to assign a sex to one victim.) The bodies of an astounding number of victims, 32 in all, were dismembered. The GVP database includes information on the identify of only 56 victims. Occupational information is available for 45. The most common occupational category was taxi driver (8) followed by police officer (5, including 3 federal and 2 municipal police), misc salaried employee (5), bus driver (3), mechanic (3), bricklayer (2), electrician (2), medical doctor (1), public prosecutor (1), lifeguard (1), caddie (1), and so on.
The dates of the killings clearly illustrate, if in perhaps exaggerated form, the shifting strategies of criminal organizations operating in Acapulco since 2007. In the early years of the drug war the focus of attention was the port itself, used by traffickers to import South American cocaine onshore. When Arturo Beltrán Leyva first came to Acapulco, initially as a Sinaloa operative, his attention was focused on the bulk movement of cocaine and other narcotics. Naval interdiction efforts made this progressively more difficult, however, and control over the retail sale of drugs and other contraband, extortion, and kidnapping became the organization’s economic underpinning. Control over working class neighborhoods emerged as the focal point of competition, especially after the roster of well-connected and experienced traffickers was thinned by Beltrán Leyva’s death and La Barbie’s arrest. By the time La Barredora emerged from within the CIDA wholesale cocaine trafficking was a thing of the past; now the competition centered on control over working class neighborhoods. They became killing fields. The numbers from the Cayaco-Puerto Marqués highway tell the story. From 2007 through 2009 only four victims were recovered on the highway. The GVP database is incomplete for 2010 but the single body in the database that was recovered on the road in this year is indicative of the low levels of violence at the time.
The turning point came in January of 2011. On January 8th La Barredora gunmen blocked traffic on the highway to allow others to work at leisure in arraying the heads and bodies of 15 decapitated victims on a sidewalk at a newly built shopping mall. The violence steadily intensified thereafter as CIDA sought to fend off La Barredora’s onslaught. The GVP database lacks records for the key months of late 2011 but this clearly was the period of escalation. The violence peaked in 2012, ebbed in 2013, and has nearly returned to its original levels in 2014. By year, the numbers are thus: 2007 – 1; 2008 – 3; 2009 – 0; 2010 – 1; 2011 – 24 (16 dismemberments); 2012 – 54 (16 dismemberments); 2013 – 13; and 2014 – 5.
To conclude this post I’ll say a few words about what we know of the circumstances that led to the decline in violence along the Cayaco-Puerto Marqués highway. The rise of La Barredora and CIDA’s counterattacks were so extraordinarily vicious and graphic that it prompted state and federal authorities to make what clearly was a concentrated effort to arrest members of both groups, especially the leadership. The combination of pressure from police and military forces and attrition on the battlefield left both groups depleted; neither of them appear to have survived as coherent organizations beyond 2013. Indeed, throughout 2014 the level of violence in Acapulco has remained steady at a level sharply below the heights of 2011 through 2013. But there is cause for continued concern. The muster of state and federal forces that contributed to the diminished levels of violence has ended and Acapulco has returned to much the condition it was in at the beginning. I would also note that the numbers from October 2014 are not encouraging. The GVP database has records of 57 homicides in Acapulco in October, well below the recorded high of 137 (in September 2012) but the highest number registered this year and a number well above the monthly average of 40 that had held steady for the previous 10 months. What is equally worrying, the violence in October occurred disproportionately in the working class neighborhoods of colonias Coloso, Zapata, and Renacimiento that bore the brunt of the war between La Barredora and CIDA. If there is a bright side, it is that there have been few dismemberments and no narcomensajes claiming territory on behalf of a named group. These are hallmarks of organized violence and, mercifully, there has been scant sign of them in 2014.
Guerrero Violence Project
Map of the Day – Acapulco, Cayaco – Puerto Marqués highway
In Acapulco the vacuum caused by the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva in December 2009 was initially filled by a group centered around Édgar Valdez Villarreal (La Barbie). The arrest of Valdez in the late summer of 2010 and infighting among the members of the group, which by mid 2010 was calling itself the Cártel Independiente de Acapulco (CIDA), set the stage for the emergence of La Barredora in January 2011. La Barredora was formed by CIDA defectors who allied themselves with the Beltrán Leyva group’s historical rivals in Sinaloa. The resulting conflagration witnessed levels of violence not seen in Guerrero since the height of the Mexican Revolution. The violence was concentrated most particularly in Acapulco’s working class neighborhoods.
Installment 5 in this series includes homicide victims whose bodies were recovered along the 6.9 km stretch of highway between Cayaco and Puerto Marqués. The highway cuts through an area that has seen rapid urban growth in the form of middle class residential development with large pockets of more densely settled working class housing projects. In the accompanying map I have included only bodies recovered along or within a few meters of the highway itself. The total number of victims appearing on the map is 101, or one body for every 68 meters of highway. But the GVP data are incomplete through the key months of July through December of 2011. The fighting was approaching its peak during this period and it is likely that a dozen or more victims are missing.
Of the 101 bodies recovered on the highway, 95 were males ranging in age from 15 to 60. Only five were females, ages 25 to 36. (There is insufficient information to assign a sex to one victim.) The bodies of an astounding number of victims, 32 in all, were dismembered. The GVP database includes information on the identify of only 56 victims. Occupational information is available for 45. The most common occupational category was taxi driver (8) followed by police officer (5, including 3 federal and 2 municipal police), misc salaried employee (5), bus driver (3), mechanic (3), bricklayer (2), electrician (2), medical doctor (1), public prosecutor (1), lifeguard (1), caddie (1), and so on.
The dates of the killings clearly illustrate, if in perhaps exaggerated form, the shifting strategies of criminal organizations operating in Acapulco since 2007. In the early years of the drug war the focus of attention was the port itself, used by traffickers to import South American cocaine onshore. When Arturo Beltrán Leyva first came to Acapulco, initially as a Sinaloa operative, his attention was focused on the bulk movement of cocaine and other narcotics. Naval interdiction efforts made this progressively more difficult, however, and control over the retail sale of drugs and other contraband, extortion, and kidnapping became the organization’s economic underpinning. Control over working class neighborhoods emerged as the focal point of competition, especially after the roster of well-connected and experienced traffickers was thinned by Beltrán Leyva’s death and La Barbie’s arrest. By the time La Barredora emerged from within the CIDA wholesale cocaine trafficking was a thing of the past; now the competition centered on control over working class neighborhoods. They became killing fields. The numbers from the Cayaco-Puerto Marqués highway tell the story. From 2007 through 2009 only four victims were recovered on the highway. The GVP database is incomplete for 2010 but the single body in the database that was recovered on the road in this year is indicative of the low levels of violence at the time.
The turning point came in January of 2011. On January 8th La Barredora gunmen blocked traffic on the highway to allow others to work at leisure in arraying the heads and bodies of 15 decapitated victims on a sidewalk at a newly built shopping mall. The violence steadily intensified thereafter as CIDA sought to fend off La Barredora’s onslaught. The GVP database lacks records for the key months of late 2011 but this clearly was the period of escalation. The violence peaked in 2012, ebbed in 2013, and has nearly returned to its original levels in 2014. By year, the numbers are thus: 2007 – 1; 2008 – 3; 2009 – 0; 2010 – 1; 2011 – 24 (16 dismemberments); 2012 – 54 (16 dismemberments); 2013 – 13; and 2014 – 5.
To conclude this post I’ll say a few words about what we know of the circumstances that led to the decline in violence along the Cayaco-Puerto Marqués highway. The rise of La Barredora and CIDA’s counterattacks were so extraordinarily vicious and graphic that it prompted state and federal authorities to make what clearly was a concentrated effort to arrest members of both groups, especially the leadership. The combination of pressure from police and military forces and attrition on the battlefield left both groups depleted; neither of them appear to have survived as coherent organizations beyond 2013. Indeed, throughout 2014 the level of violence in Acapulco has remained steady at a level sharply below the heights of 2011 through 2013. But there is cause for continued concern. The muster of state and federal forces that contributed to the diminished levels of violence has ended and Acapulco has returned to much the condition it was in at the beginning. I would also note that the numbers from October 2014 are not encouraging. The GVP database has records of 57 homicides in Acapulco in October, well below the recorded high of 137 (in September 2012) but the highest number registered this year and a number well above the monthly average of 40 that had held steady for the previous 10 months. What is equally worrying, the violence in October occurred disproportionately in the working class neighborhoods of colonias Coloso, Zapata, and Renacimiento that bore the brunt of the war between La Barredora and CIDA. If there is a bright side, it is that there have been few dismemberments and no narcomensajes claiming territory on behalf of a named group. These are hallmarks of organized violence and, mercifully, there has been scant sign of them in 2014.
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