Bodies hanging, extortion and suspicion: the Zacatecas crime exposes cartel infiltration in Mexico

Around 20 men wearing balaclavas and carrying assault rifles pointed toward the sky stare into the camera, with a rural landscape in the background. One of them, standing in front of the others, reads from a sheet of paper. Beside him, a black banner bearing the initials CDS-MF identifies the group: Sinaloa Cartel–Mayito Flaco, one of the factions that has split from the criminal organization. In the foreground, a man lies on the ground holding a machine gun. This was the scene staged by the cartel two days after the discovery, last Saturday, of 10 bodies at three different locations in the state of Zacatecas, in central Mexico. Five of the victims were found hanging from a bridge, half-naked.

The cartel sought to send several messages, as if the killing of 10 businessmen and local officials last Saturday had not been enough. They called it a “small show of authority.” In a two-minute statement, the group threatened “any citizen who seeks to protest or is against our rules” with “ending up hanged or a little worse.”

The cartel also confronts Zacatecas Governor David Monreal, a member of Morena, the left-wing party that governs Mexico: “If you betray the agreements we have, not only with you but with all the corporations, you and all your descendants will end up the same or worse.” It then adds, referring to the killings: “For our part, we are fulfilling our side, and as proof, there is what we were ordered to do.”

Beyond spreading terror, the message is further evidence of how deeply cartels are woven into the social fabric of small towns across Mexico and how brazenly they try to impose their own order on the places where they operate and on society as a whole.

The preliminary investigation by the Zacatecas prosecutor’s office points to the “voluntary or coerced” involvement of two of the murdered victims in an “extortion ring,” and is also examining the connections of a municipal official who was also killed. Most of the victims in the latest massacre were businesspeople, including individuals involved in mining, construction, event management, and the owner of a concert bar, as well as two active municipal officials in the city of Fresnillo: one responsible for social development and the other a civil protection firefighter.

The state government says it is investigating the origin of the video. “It is supposedly a cartel group making a series of absurd claims with political overtones,” said the uniformed general in charge of security in Zacatecas, casting doubt on the video’s authenticity. Yet 48 hours after the message was released, on Wednesday, Zacatecas Interior Secretary Rodrigo Reyes Mugüerza felt compelled to respond directly to the cartel’s claims: “We categorically reject any suggestion that there is any agreement or connection whatsoever with organized crime.”

Unlike the authorities, who must gather evidence to determine what happened, criminals need no proof to spread fear and thrust themselves into local politics. All they have to do is sow doubt in such a defiant manner. Even if the message were eventually proven not to have come from a cartel, or to be entirely fabricated, it has already forced the state government onto the defensive in a country where suspicions of ties between organized crime and public officials run deep and have even cast doubt on past election results.

The most prominent case is that of Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya, also a member of Morena, who is currently on temporary leave after the United States accused him of collusion with drug traffickers. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has called on Washington to provide compelling evidence before he is handed over to the U.S. justice system.

Much of Zacatecas is desert and sparsely populated, with 1.6 million inhabitants. Located in the center of Mexico, the state is crossed by a strategic highway network linking routes between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, as well as the country’s north-south transport corridors extending toward the United States. Drugs move along those same routes, making them a key battleground for rival cartels competing for distribution networks.

But that is not the only prize. Zacatecas is also rich in silver and other mineral deposits. “Criminal groups are involved in a range of other businesses. There is silver, gold, lithium, lead, zinc... And they specialize in extorting mining companies, which often have transnational capital,” says Raúl Benítez Manaut, a sociologist at the Center for Research on North America.

In Zacatecas, the northern part of the state is controlled by the Los Mayo faction of the fractured Sinaloa Cartel, while the Jalisco New Generation Cartel operates in the south. The two groups are locked in a bloody struggle for territorial control that kept Zacatecas among Mexico’s most violent states until only a few years ago.

“The display of the killings, with bodies hanging in public, bears the hallmarks of Los Zetas, who once controlled Zacatecas before being largely dismantled by the Mexican Navy, although remnants may still remain,” says Benítez Manaut. In his view, the message released by the gunmen was intended as a show of strength, demonstrating that they are “arriving with extreme violence.” He adds: “It is not normal for them to challenge the authorities like this. There are elections next year, and they are effectively telling the political parties: ‘We’re here, we’re very powerful, and you’ll have to make deals with us.’”

Condolences and funerals followed one after another during the first two days after the bodies were discovered. Eight of the victims died of asphyxiation and two from gunshot wounds. Investigators have yet to establish the exact sequence of events, beyond determining that the crimes occurred between 5:00 a.m. and 7:15 a.m. on Saturday. There were at least two gatherings involving groups of three people. The firefighter was part of one of those groups “by chance,” while another victim, a former mayor and businessman, was abducted.

On Thursday, the state prosecutor said there were indications that several of the victims were linked, “voluntarily or under coercion,” to an extortion-collection network. He stressed that no formal extortion complaints had been filed, acknowledged the seriousness of the problem, and urged citizens to come forward and “have confidence” in the authorities so that such crimes can be prevented. The former mayor had filed a complaint in 2024, but it concerned a matter that had since been “resolved,” according to the state interior secretary, and was no longer active. On Friday, Fresnillo Mayor Javier Torres, a member of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) testified for three hours. The prosecutor described his statement as “essential,” although no details were disclosed.

Governor David Monreal said there “will be no impunity” and that the process of “pacifying the state is irreversible,” he said at a press conference on Monday. “We will not go back to that long dark night, to those not-so-distant times with executions one day yes and the next day also; it reached 65 police officers killed in one year,” he recalled. After condemning the brutality of the killings, he presented figures and downward charts: if in 2021 there were 1,741 intentional homicides and Zacatecas was the state with the most murders per 100,000 inhabitants (11.1), in 2025 there were 149 and so far this year 48. “It is a titanic effort,” the governor, who took office in 2021, said. The presentation claimed a 97.2% reduction in this indicator, but he said nothing about how disappearances and extortions have increased in the same period.

The federal government sent 400 soldiers to Zacatecas and this Thursday another hundred to reinforce security. President Sheinbaum has barely mentioned the massacre in her daily press conference, despite the strong impact it has had on the public. She has only said that information will be provided and that an investigation is under way, while boasting, in the same week, that July 21 was the day with the fewest murders nationwide in at least eight years, with 21. In fact, the president has praised Zacatecas’s progress as an example of success in reducing homicides.

The 10 killings have shattered that image. “Violence was reduced because there was a pax narca, a mafia pact to maintain peace, not because of the actions of public security,” says David Saucedo, a security adviser to companies and embassies. In his view, “someone switched sides in criminal governance, someone cooperated with a rival group to obtain benefits, because the narco has no party; it can work with everyone in mining, agriculture, construction contracts to launder money… And that video aims to provoke panic. What is missing is dismantling criminal networks, arresting narco-mayors.”

Fresnillo, the state’s most populous city, with about 240,000 inhabitants, is the scene that connects the crimes. Most of the victims worked there; in 2021 Fresnillo topped the national list of cities with the highest perception of insecurity: 95% of the 240,000 residents felt that way. The municipal government has endured years of violence besides the two officials killed on Saturday: 15 days ago, a motorcyclist fatally shot the mayor of Fresnillo from 2013 to 2016, Benjamín Medrano, who had been Mexico’s first openly gay mayor. The previous head of social development, Juan Pérez Guardado, was also murdered and was the brother-in-law of a senator related to the governor. A nephew of both, a municipal official in Fresnillo, was shot dead two years ago.

The governor of Zacatecas belongs to the influential Monreal political dynasty. Nine of his brothers hold or have held political positions in Mexico: governors, senators, several mayors of Fresnillo and other trusted posts across administrations. However, Fresnillo is now governed by a coalition of parties opposed to Morena—the PRI, the PRD and the PAN—and it is within this municipal administration that two people were killed.

It is in this context that the cartel poisons the situation further. “In electoral periods, or as now, when it must be decided who will control Morena in this state, violence erupts,” explains political scientist Noé Hernández of the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, who specializes in electoral violence. “The video shows that criminal organizations want to destabilize that internal process [within Morena], that there be a rearrangement of their interests and to hold the state government responsible for these deaths,” he says. “In fact, with the killings it challenges the official narrative of the drop in homicides and seeks to accuse the governor of criminalizing the opposition.”