Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said yesterday that “there are no elements” that support the version that the Sinaloa cartel is behind the assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.
“I would not dare to advance anything about the reasons because there are no elements. They are, in any case, hypotheses and may even be conjectures, we must not forget that things are always invented, and more so in electoral times”, declared the president in his morning press conference.
The president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, had pointed to organized crime for the attack against the candidate, who revealed on July 31 that he had received threats from José Adolfo Macías Villamar, alias Fito, identified as the leader of Los Choneros, group with ties to the Mexican Sinaloa cartel.
López Obrador denied that the Government of Mexico has any information on the matter. “We do not have this information, and it does attract my attention that they immediately begin to distribute blame in a very sensationalistic and unserious and unresponsible way on the authorities and the media, which in most cases are of manipulation, not of media”, he indicated.
The Mexican president asked to “act with great responsibility, with great seriousness, not to blame anyone lightly, wait for the investigations, and wait for the results of the investigation to be known and for those responsible to be punished.”
López Obrador, like all Latin American leaders, condemned the mass murder. “These are very difficult, unfortunate moments and also reprehensible, very painful events,” he said. And he compared what had happened with the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, in March 1994. “We suffered it, we suffered it when Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated. Many must remember those sad moments, of anguish, fear, of fear, which is why we are very sorry that this happened in Ecuador”, he indicated.
The Sinaloa Cartel, also known as the Pacific Cartel, is a Mexican criminal organization dedicated to drug trafficking and various criminal activities, mainly from Culiacán, capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa,
After seizing the territories dominated by the Juárez and Tijuana cartels a few years ago, the Sinaloa cartel now operates in half of the states of Mexico and almost the entire border with the United States. And it is currently competing and at war with the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel.
The visible command of the organization since the capture (for the third time) and extradition to the United States of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán is in the hands of Ismael El Mayo Zambada.
On Wednesday, the same day of Villavicencio’s murder, the US imposed sanctions on Mexican drug traffickers Félix Núñez, alias El Changuito, and the brothers Alfonso and René Arzate, whom it accuses of being part of the Sinaloa cartel and participating in drug trafficking fentanyl, the drug that wreaks havoc. He defines them as “extremely violent”.
