Thousands took to the streets Thursday to protest the killing of two children in an attempted carjacking in Mexico’s troubled northwestern state of Sinaloa.
Mothers and children in school uniforms were among those calling for an end to months of cartel violence that has at times closed schools and businesses in the state capital, Culiacan.
A group of children made banners with slogans such as “I want to live, not survive,” Agence France-Presse reported.
A small group of protesters forced their way into the offices of Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha, trashing them and demanding his resignation. Rocha, a close ally of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been unable to control his state’s violence despite the deployment of troops.
“We understand people’s outrage,” state spokesman Feliciano Castro said a short time later, noting that federal authorities were investigating the killings.
Brothers Gael and Alexander Sarmiento, ages 12 and 9 respectively, and their father were fatally shot Sunday when armed men tried to steal their vehicle. Two other minors were injured. State authorities have suggested the vehicle’s tinted windows could have been a factor, but it was unclear how.
Thursday’s march was organized by the younger brother’s elementary school.
It was a large display of public anger for a city firmly in the grip of the Sinaloa cartel. Culiacan has suffered months of intense violence as two cartel factions have battled for control since the arrests last year in the U.S. of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
Zambada claimed he was ambushed by Joaquin Guzman Lopez, one of “El Chapol”‘s sons, who he said lured him onto a plane that was headed for the United States, where “El Chapo” himself is serving a life sentence.
Early Thursday, an explosion in the parking lot of a supermarket in Culiacan damaged a memorial dedicated to Edgar Guzman Lopez, a son of “El Chapo” who was killed in 2008. A bullet-ridden car was left nearby.
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The ongoing war between the cartel’s “Mayos” and “Chapitos” has left hundreds of people dead and hundreds missing, according to the state prosecutor’s office. According to an indictment by the U.S. Justice Department, the Chapitos and their cartel associates have used corkscrews, electrocution and hot chiles to torture their rivals while some of their victims were “fed dead or alive to tigers.”
Bodies have appeared across the city, often left slung out on the streets or in cars with either sombreros on their heads or pizza slices or boxes pegged onto them with knives. The pizzas and sombreros have become informal symbols for the warring cartel factions, underscoring the brutality of their warfare.
The ongoing violence has been one of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s biggest challenges since taking office in October. Her administration is under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to reduce smuggling of the synthetic opioid fentanyl into the United States and the Sinaloa cartel is one of the world’s largest illicit producers.
Outrage over the deaths of the children grew online this week and fueled Thursday’s march to be “more effusive, more emotional, very very sad and much harder” than other protests in the capital, said EstefanÃa López, of Culiacan Valiente, a collective that has organized previous peace marches.
“It took on a life of its own, I think a lot of people woke up,” López said. “The disgust … has been such that today the people came out.”
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.