LOROMA DE FLORES (Mexico), Jan 28 — The murder of 11 people at a football game has sparked deep anger in the central Mexican town of Loma de Flores, where sport is promoted as a way of keeping young people safe from drug cartels.

“We no longer know where to find peace,” Norma Barron, one of the promoters of the league that was attacked on Sunday, told AFP.

An afternoon of football, thronged by families, was drawing to a close when armed men stormed the grounds near the city of Salamanca in Guanajuato state on Sunday.

The gunmen arrived in at least three vehicles, Barron told AFP.

A preliminary investigation pointed to a settling of scores between two powerful criminal gangs.

Barron, an activist with a collective that searches for tens of thousands of Mexicans who have vanished, many of them kidnapped and killed by cartels, was in the southern state of Oaxaca at the time of the attack.

As soon as the shooting began, her adult son, who was at the game, called her, terrified.

“‘They’re attacking people, there are several dead, we’re taking cover,’” she cited him as saying in an interview at the football field, where the grass was still smeared with blood on Monday.

Local and federal authorities confirmed 11 deaths in the latest massacre to send shockwaves through violence-plagued Mexico, which will co-host this year’s football FIFA World Cup together with the United States and Canada.

A further 10 people sustained gunshot wounds, including a woman and a minor.

Neighbors and relatives of the victims, who were still in shock a day later, told AFP that the shooting lasted for 15 to 20 minutes.

Items of players’ clothing lay on the pitch, along with discarded beer cans and candles lit in the victims’ memory.

Nearby, half a dozen cars lay abandoned, their owners having fled in terror.

Settling of scores 

Among the dead were at least five members of a security company that was responsible for protecting the venue and ensuring that attendees were unarmed.

According to a federal security source, who asked not to be identified because the person was not authorized to speak to the press, the guards were the target of the attack because they worked for a company allegedly linked to the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).

The attackers, the official added, were believed to be from the rival Santa Rosa de Lima cartel, which vies with the CJNG for fuel and drug trafficking and extortion rackets in the state.

Messages written on cardboard signs found at the scene also alluded to a dispute between the two groups.

Relentless violence 

The attack shone a light on the relentlessness of gang turf wars in Guanajuato, a thriving industrial hub which doubles as one of Mexico’s deadliest states.

President Claudia Sheinbaum has claimed credit for a fall in the murder rate – currently at its lowest rate in a decade – since she took office in October 2024.

But her anti-narco strategy has yet to bear fruit in Guanajuato, where the murder rate is over double the national average, at 38.84 per 100,000.

The state has also witnessed several brutal attacks on entertainment venues, including an assault on a Christmas party in December 2023 that left 11 people dead, and a shootout at a swimming pool in April of the same year that resulted in six deaths.

Guanajuato Governor Libia Garcia announced Monday the start of a joint operation by state and federal forces in the area. — AFP