Boy, 12, killed by stray bullet from gunmen on jet skis as Mexico’s drugs war hits boiling point

Gunmen on jet skis killed a 12-year-old boy after opening fire at a rival drug dealer on a beach in the resort town of Cancun, Mexican authorities have said.

It comes as Mexico‘s president took the unusual step on Monday of issuing a public appeal to drug cartels not to fight each other following last week’s detention of top Mexican drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquin Guzman Lopez.

Prosecutors said in a statement late on Sunday that the boy suffered gunshot wounds and was taken to a hospital where he later died. The boy was a local resident who apparently was lying on a lounge chair on the beach with his family when he was shot.

Authorities said the intended targets of the gunmen were rivals engaged in a dispute over drug sales. The boy was apparently hit by stray bullets.

Territorial disputes between drug dealers have cost the lives of several tourists in the resorts along Mexico’s Caribbean coast in recent years.

In 2022, two Canadians were killed in Playa del Carmen, south of Cancun, apparently because of debts between international drug and weapons trafficking gangs.

In 2021, further south in Tulum, two tourists — one a California travel blogger born in India and a German national — were killed when they apparently were caught in the crossfire of a gunfight between rival drug dealers.

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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at his daily press briefing on Monday that he trusted that drug traffickers knew they would only suffer if they stepped up the internal wars that already plague the Sinaloa cartel.

“Those who are engaged in these illegal activities know they resolve nothing with confrontations,” López Obrador said, adding “they would go out and risk the lives of other human beings, and why make families suffer?”

“I trust that there will be no confrontations,” he said, despite the fact the army announced over the weekend that it had sent an additional 200 elite soldiers from a paratrooper unit to the state of Sinaloa just in case.

There were no immediate reports of increased violence over the weekend. But the Sinaloa cartel has been driven for years by fighting between followers of Zambada, and rivals who follow the sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the father of Guzman Lopez. There are other sons still at large.

Both Zambada and Guzman’s son played leading roles in the Sinaloa cartel, and both were detained last Thursday when they arrived in Texas aboard a private airplane.

Lopez Obrador has a record of publicly appealing to drug gangs for peace, sometimes even praising them.

In 2021, Lopez Obrador praised the largely peaceful voting in elections that year and sent a message of recognition to the drug cartels that fuel much of the country’s violence.

“People who belong to organized crime behaved very well, in general, there were few acts of violence by these groups,” the president said at the time. “I think the white-collar criminals acted worse.”

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The detention of Zambada and Guzman Lopez has proved a major embarrassment for the president, Mexican officials were forced to admit they knew nothing about the operation until it was all over.

Zambada had eluded authorities for decades and had never set foot in prison until a plane carrying him and Guzman Lopez landed at an airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, near El Paso, Texas, on Thursday.

Both men, who face various U.S. drug charges, were arrested and remain jailed.

Zambada’s lawyer pushed back Sunday against claims that his client was tricked into flying into the country, saying he was “forcibly kidnapped” by Guzman Lopez. If that were true, it could stoke accusations of betrayal, and additional fighting, between the factions.

Lopez Obrador said there were indications that U.S. authorities had been negotiating with Guzman Lopez to turn himself for some time, possibly for months or years before the drug lord apparently decided to do so.

But the Mexican president said nothing was known about how Zambada ended up on the flight, and that Mexican prosecutors were investigating to see if he was kidnapped.

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Frank Perez, Zambada’s attorney, said his client did not end up at the New Mexico airport of his own free will.“My client neither surrendered nor negotiated any terms with the U.S. government,” Perez said in a statement.

“Joaquin Guzman Lopez forcibly kidnapped my client. He was ambushed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed by six men in military uniforms and Joaquin. His legs were tied, and a black bag was placed over his head.”

Perez went on to say that Zambada, 76, was thrown in the back of a pickup truck, forced onto a plane and tied to the seat by Guzman Lopez.

Known as an astute operator skilled at corrupting officials, Zambada has a reputation for being able to negotiate with everyone, including rivals. He is charged in a number of U.S. cases, including in New York and California.

Prosecutors brought a new indictment against him in New York in February, describing him as the “principal leader of the criminal enterprise responsible for importing enormous quantities of narcotics into the United States.”