Little is known about when the pressure on Alejandro Arcos began. Not even if they started like that, in the form of pressure, and not disguised as selfless support for their electoral campaign. The mayor of Chilpancingo, who was murdered last weekend, decapitated, his head left on the roof of his truck, had a major challenge before him: to stop the political inertia of the moment, the steamroller of Morena, who governed his city and the State of Guerrero. He did it, he won the mayoral election by just over 1,000 votes. But everything got complicated in the following months.
From a well-known family in the area, Arcos was contending for an alliance that was unthinkable years ago, which brought together the PRI and the PAN with the PRD, under the idea of unifying the opposition. His rival was Jorge Salgado, the Morena candidate, who replaced Norma Otilia Hernández, the incumbent mayor, repudiated by the party, on the ballot. Last year, Hernández had starred in videos in which she appeared sitting in a restaurant with Celso Ortega, the leader of a criminal group in the central area of Guerrero, known as Los Ardillos. In the images, taken with a hidden camera, the mayor spoke casually with Ortega about the political families of the State, among other things. After these images were disseminated, Hernández tried this year to seek reelection to his position, but the party did not allow him to do so. The mayor then put her electoral base at the service of Arcos, which cost her her expulsion from the cherry formation.
The mayor’s videos made evident the presence of crime in the local political scene, her interactions with power. Not that it was a secret. For years, the church had played a mediating role with criminal groups in the entity. At the beginning of this year, faced with the wave of murders and attacks in the capital between Los Ardillos and the opposing group, Los Tlacos, and between the latter and more groups in other regions of the State, the bishops of Guerrero tried to mediate to close the conflicts, negotiations that ended up leaking to the press. No one seemed surprised or upset.
In conversations that EL PAÍS has had these days with people familiar with the political reality of central Guerrero, the idea that crime and the administration share the table appears as the starting point of every argument. A source, who asks that his name or details that could reveal his identity not appear, points out, for example, that criminal groups, particularly Los Ardillos, are interested in controlling the security and public works secretariats of the important cities in the area. , that is, Chilpancingo, and neighboring Chilapa.
As in many regions of Mexico, crime in Guerrero has understood that drug trafficking is just one of many lucrative options. Extortion is imposed in many productive sectors, markets, stores, transportation routes… Municipal budgets do not escape their gaze, hence the battle to woo their managers, a situation that, far from being friendly, can have fatal outcomes, such as the murder of Alejandro Arcos. The image of his severed head speaks of a failed negotiation, but also of the harshness of the exchange that, based on the statements of the people consulted these days, is always inevitable.
The boss
The question is how a relatively common process, these negotiations between crime and local political spheres, ended in such a savage way. A person who spoke with the mayor “10 or 12 days before they killed him,” whose name does not appear for security reasons, says that the mayor told him that Los Ardillos had demanded control of the municipal police. According to his account, Arcos refused and chose an Army captain, Ulises Hernández. On September 29, criminals killed Hernández and his wife in Chilpancingo. According to this person, Los Ardillos responded in this way to the mayor’s refusal.
The request, according to this source, was the logical consequence of the alleged support that Los Ardillos had provided to Arcos during the campaign. The criminal group, which has its fiefdom in a community in the nearby municipality of Quechultenango, maintains bases in a good part of the rural towns in the southeast of the city. “Easy, Celso Ortega got him more than 10,000 votes,” he says. Arcos obtained a total of just over 45,000. This does not mean that the mayor was satisfied with the support of Los Ardillos. The source paints the situation as a case of mandatory collaboration.
“Celso Ortega is the head of the PRI in central Guerrero,” says this same person. Although it sounds strong, his assertion supports what the former bishop of Chilpancingo, Salvador Rangel, said in an interview with this newspaper in 2022, about Ortega’s closeness to the PRI. Rangel, close to Ortega, said that the leader of Los Ardillos had supported the tricolor party in the electoral campaign for governor, in 2021. Then, Morena won, but the criminal group persevered and would have continued with its support for the PRI. In the elections of June 2, in addition to Arcos, they managed to his candidate, Mercedes Carballo, will win the mayoralty of Chilapa.
There has been much speculation these days about who killed the mayor and two people from his team, the soldier Hernández and, days later, the secretary of the City Council, Francisco Tapia, number two of Arcos, who was executed in the street in broad daylight. of the day. The versions are sometimes contradictory. In the case of the soldier Hernández, another source, who knows the steps the mayor took in his last weeks, and who prefers to maintain his anonymity for safety, points to Los Tlacos as those responsible for his murder. This person argues that Los Tlacos attacked because they knew that Los Ardillos wanted the Security Secretariat and linked the military officer with their rivals.
That same source attributes Tapia’s death to Los Ardillos, as a kind of revenge for the first homicide. Regarding this same murder, the source that places Ortega at the head of the PRI in the region indicates that it was the work of Los Ardillos, a “second call for attention” towards Arcos – the first being the military man – for not complying with an alleged agreement which they did in exchange for the electoral support that the mayor’s office gave them. In any case, all versions suggest that there was a dispute over the local police.
Another source consulted, whose name also does not appear for security reasons, indicates that Arcos had contact with the leader of Los Tlacos, Onísimo Marquina, alias Necho. It is not clear when this contact occurred, but the source assures that Los Ardillos’ final anger with Arcos—and the savagery with which they killed him—occurred precisely when Celso Ortega learned of these contacts. This source rules out that Los Tlacos killed the future police chief. “They were aware that Arcos was not their candidate, they could not ask him to be the Secretary of Security,” he points out.
Beyond the contradictions in the versions, what is known is that the day he appeared decapitated, Arcos went to a meeting in Petaquillas, a rural area influenced by Los Ardillos. He did it alone, “without escorts or a driver,” the federal Security Secretary, Omar García Harfuch, reported this week. One of the sources consulted, close to Arcos’ work team, assures that his intention was to go to calm the waters after two men he had chosen as members of his Cabinet were killed in less than 10 days. Since he knew what he was getting into, the same source points out, he asked his bodyguards to let him leave without protection.
The brutality of the murder perplexed the entire country. Speculation about who gave the order to kill him or why flooded social media. Also the threats that were proposed to speak on behalf of the organized crime groups of Guerrero. The mayor’s deputy, Gustavo Alarcón, protested in front of Congress last Thursday and stated that it was possible to govern the municipality without making pacts with crime. The federal authorities did not address the issue again, and the thunderous silence on the situation in Chilpancingo that the governor, Evelyn Salgado, made, had a short parenthesis to show her support for the new municipal president, who must assume the hot potato in the middle of the tragedy.