The bombs started raining down from cartel drones at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, just as the sun crested over the mountains of central Mexico.
The cluster of rural communities known as Guajes de Ayala now under siege had spent weeks warning law enforcement in the state of Guerrero of mounting threats by the encroaching cartel, La Nueva Familia Michoacana. But their calls for help went unheeded as World Cup celebrations engulfed major hubs like Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey.
Now, all 24-year-old Marilu Solorio could do was hide in a nearby abandoned medical clinic, together with 70 other women, children and elderly — hoping the constant sound of drone explosions and gunfire between the cartel and the community’s vigilante group would end.
And when it did, that they would all still be alive.
“While some are celebrating goals, others are getting massacred by drones carrying bombs,” Solorio said, speaking about the soccer tournament over the phone from her shelter. “Instead of protecting people in the places where they’ve been playing the World Cup, (Mexico’s government) should be protecting people like us, who have never done anything wrong.”
Mexican forces have concentrated on World Cup hubs
Mexican authorities quickly denied the attacks in violence-struck Guerrero — despite livestreamed videos by locals showing gunfire and smoke billowing from mountain lookouts set up by the residents to watch for signs of cartel presence.
The attacks came as Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has spent months grappling with how to address endemic criminal violence in Mexico.
While killings have sharply decreased under Sheinbaum, pressure has mounted over the past year as Mexico sought to project security and stability ahead of the World Cup following a burst of violence in February in one host city, Guadalajara. Compounding that are added threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to take military action on cartels and other internal political ruptures.
As a result, Mexico doubled down on security in the World Cup hubs, deploying 100,000 security forces largely to Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara to safeguard the tournament. The leg of the competition in Mexico, which wrapped up on Sunday, ended without major security incidents.
While soccer fans packed the streets of key cities in celebration of the sport and memes of ducks donning Mexico jerseys flooded social media, violence in many parts of the country only continued.
Mexican security analyst David Saucedo says the attacks like the ones in Guajes de Ayala and other areas haunted by cartel violence are the fallout of the government’s World Cup security strategy.
“There was heavy security in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey. Lots of military and National Guard officers from other states were transferred to fortify World Cup hosts,” Saucedo said. “But in doing that, they also left a number of regions that weren’t host cities unprotected.”
In northern Sinaloa, weekend clashes between criminal groups left a naval officer and 10 suspected gang members dead. The week before, in southern Veracruz, the local government said it found the body of a kidnapped journalist, who it says was killed by criminal groups.
On Wednesday in the southern state of Chiapas, which has been eclipsed by violent cartel power struggles in recent years, eight bodies were found in a pile with cartel messages.
Warnings of an impending attack went unheeded
The Guajes de Ayala community had warned law enforcement that the cartel was closing in on their town and also shared videos of cartel drones hovering overhead and the location of cartel fighters inching closer to their homes on social media.
They said they feared an impending attack. Solario said no one helped.
On Wednesday morning that came to a head. While Solario and her group sought refuge from the firefight in the abandoned clinic, others elsewhere sheltered in churches.
Local and federal authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but after the AP inquired about the attacks, Mexico’s Security Cabinet posted on X that “events described in news articles have been ruled out” by authorities.
The post added that state security forces “are heading to the area to verify the situation, strengthen institutional presence, and provide security to the population.”
Authorities had previously denied accusations that they’ve abandoned the Guerrero communities but when the AP recently visited the region, there was no state presence anywhere near the communities.
For years, the La Nueva Familia Michoacana — which was declared a foreign terrorist organization last year by the Trump administration, along with other Mexican cartels and Central and South American gangs — has been pushing into Guerrero.
In response to attacks and what the community said was an absence by security authorities, hundreds have fled their homes. In recent years, men in the community have formed a vigilante group to fight back.
The vigilante group was armed by rival cartels, fighting for territory with La Nueva Familia Michoacana, and carried military-grade weapons smuggled from the U.S., grenades and drones, which they used to monitor the encroaching cartel.
For a place like Guerrero, marked by decades of warring criminal factions, the locals have long said it wasn’t a question of if they would face another attack, but when.
