Indigenous Musicians in Mexico Burned to Death by Drug Cartel

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Ten indigenous musicians are believed to be the recent victims of drug-related violence in western Mexico, according to an article by BBC.

Authorities reported, the members of Nahuas indigenous group were returning from a party when they were been attacked in the town of Chilapa in Guerrero state.

The victims, all men, aged between 15 and 42, were shot and burned to death by members of Los Ardillos cartel.

The Los Ardillos cartel frequently targets indigenous people in the area, reports say.

According to David Sánchez Luna, coordinator of the regional indigenous group known as CRAC-PF, the victims who were part of the Sensación Musical group, were returning to their Alcozacán community on Friday after playing the day before when the gunmen attacked their vehicle at around 14:00 local time (20:00 GMT) in Mexcalcingo.

The bodies were unrecognizable due to their worse condition when were found by authorities. The police refused to release them to the families, leading hundreds of indigenous people to block a road on Friday night.

In an official statement, the Guerrero prosecutor's office said it was investigating the case.

According to local media, Guerrero is one of Mexico's most violent states, where drug gangs including Los Ardillos fight for control of trafficking routes to the Pacific and other parts of the country. Dozens of deaths in recent months, including many indigenous people, have been linked to the said cartel.

For many months, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's policy dubbed "abrazos, no balazos" (hugs not bullets), a non-confrontational approach to the cartels focusing, instead, on tackling inequality has been criticized especially after a number of high-profile attacks, including an ambush in which nine members of a Mormon community were killed.

Despite the president vow to create a new National Guard with 70,000 members to tackle violence, only few have signed up to the force and amid fear of being killed on the job.  In addition, after being pressured President Trump, he has diverted many of the troops to immigration enforcement duties.

A report by CFR shows that in 2018, the number of drug-related homicides in Mexico rose to 33,341, a 15 percent increase from the previous year-and a record high. Moreover, Mexican cartels killed at least 130 candidates and politicians in the lead-up to Mexico's 2018 presidential elections.

Nearly sixty thousand people have disappeared in Mexico since a crackdown on drug cartels began in 2006, Mexican officials announced. 61,637 of the disappearances date back to 1964, a jump from a 2018 estimate of 40,000 disappearances in the same period, according to New York Times. Since Obrador took office in December 2018, authorities uncovered 873 clandestine burial sites containing more than one thousand bodies, an article by The Guardian says.

Moreover, nearly 5,000 people disappeared in Mexico in 2019 and were not found.

The president has acknowledged his government's failure to bring down the homicide rate but said that other problems were more important.

"I think that the bigger damage has been done by white-collar criminals, whether politicians or businessmen who call themselves entrepreneurs," the leftist leader said at his daily news conference.