A prison riot, which kicked off with the assistance of the cartels, overflowed violently into the public areas in one Mexican city just to the south of the U.S. border and has left a total of eleven people dead in its wake.
This violence kicked off in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, when a pair of cartels sparked a riot in a prison. Said riot seems to have then splintered off to cause shootings and other riots across the area which caused a response to the tune of hundreds of Mexican troops being sent in fully armed to halt the ongoing violence, as reported by local officials.
The unrest started by the riots managed to spread out to a few other cities, such as Tijuana, and over 20 fires were reportedly lit in various areas across Baja California.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador issued an official statement, saying that “innocent civilians were attacked as a kind of retaliation,” after all the violence.
Americans in Tijuana were told by the U.S. Consulate that they were to hunker down and shelter in place.
“The U.S. Consulate General Tijuana is aware of reports of multiple vehicle fires, roadblocks, and heavy police activity in Tijuana, Mexicali, Rosarito, Ensenada, and Tecate. U.S. government employees have been instructed to shelter in place until further notice,” expressed the government entity.
The pair of cartels that kicked off this unprecedented violence were the Los Mexicles and Sinaloa Cartel, which were linked to the infamous drug kingpin “El Chapo” Guzman. Inside the prison itself, two were killed and twenty people were injured due to the fighting.
Gang members that were not inside the prison at the time then sparked seperate cells of chaos all over the city, lighting businesses on fire and shooting to kill innocent civilians, as reported by police officials. Police say that at over nine people that had no affiliation ot the gangs were killed in the ensuing violence.
“Hopefully it’s not something that will be repeated, because they attacked the civilian population, innocent people,” Obrador stated to the press this past Friday. “It wasn’t just a fight between two groups; they began shooting civilians, and this is the most unfortunate part.”
Cruz Perez Cuellar, the mayor of Juarez, called the riot attacks cowardly and stated the police officials were working together in order to restore “order” throughout the city.
There have been several gang members arrested seemingly in connection with the riots. By the end of the day Friday, authorities stated that peace had been restored to the area.