MEXICO CITY (HPD) — Twelve people, six men and six women, were killed in an armed attack Saturday night at a bar in central Mexico, authorities announced.
The incident occurred around 8 p.m. in a bar in the municipality of Irapuato, Guanajuato state, where an armed group entered the premises and began shooting at those present.
Six men and six women died in the shooting and three other people were injured, the Irapuato Citizen Security Secretariat said in a statement.
After the shooting, the police and military forces began a search operation in the area to try to locate those responsible for the incident.
The attack occurs less than a month after another violent event that took place in a pool hall in the municipality of Tarimoro, state of Guanajuato, where 10 people were shot dead.
Guanajuato is one of the six states, along with Michoacán, Baja California, the State of Mexico, Jalisco and Chihuahua, which concentrates half of the country’s homicides. Between January and September, more than 20,000 homicides were accumulated in Mexico.
The Congress, with an official majority, finally approved this week a constitutional reform to extend until 2028 the permanence of the military in the streets in public security tasks, a decision that has been rejected by humanitarian organizations and opponents who consider that the initiative deepens the militarization of the country and represents a risk to human rights. Because it is a constitutional reform, it must now be endorsed by more than half of the 32 state congresses before being promulgated by the Executive.
The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who for years defended that the military should return to the barracks, in recent months has changed his position arguing that the armed forces are required to continue carrying out public security tasks to deal with the powerful criminal organizations.
Since 2006, the Mexican military and marines have been sent to the streets to carry out police work and fight organized crime.
Despite the extensive deployment of the National Guard, which in September came under the control of the Army, and other military forces in different states of the country, the actions of criminal groups have not been contained.