5 killed in Mexican town caught between battling criminal groups

HUITZILAC, Mexico — Schools and some businesses were closed and few people walked the streets of this town south of Mexico's capital Tuesday, hours after five people were gunned down on the same street where another attack left eight dead just eight months earlier.

Huitzilac is at the center of a restive area in Morelos state with competing criminal organizations and illegal logging. Those killed were apparently campaigning for local positions managing the community's collective resources, like the surrounding forest, ahead of an election scheduled for March.

On Monday afternoon, just like every afternoon in recent weeks, four men and one woman from one of the groups competing in the local elections to manage the communal lands and forest were walking door to door campaigning. They were intercepted by gunmen in two vehicles and left dead on Huitzilac's main street.

''I told them years ago not to participate, there are always problems,'' said Blanca Delgadillo, whose son-in-law José Cuevas, a farmer, was among those killed.

Delgadillo, 70, said violence had overtaken the agricultural community in recent years, forcing its 20,000 residents to live in fear.

Mayor César Dávila Díaz, who took office Jan. 1, condemned the attack and said such events ''affect our municipality because they've always branded us a hotspot'' for violence.

The mayor denied the presence of drug cartels, dismissed the possibility of a political motive and said he didn't know what the motive was.

On Tuesday morning, traces of blood and five candles were visible on the pavement.

Two hundred members of the National Guard were arriving to support local and state police patrolling the area.

José Romero, a 53-year-old farmer, who lives just feet from where the attack took place, said he was watching television when he heard the gunshots.

He said the town's security is up and down depending on the presence of security forces. When the National Guard is not present, these kinds of attacks occur, Romero said.

An attack last May targeted men who were drinking beer after a soccer match, just two weeks before Mexico's presidential election.

President Claudia Sheinbaum, who won that election handily, took over a complicated security situation.

Scores of criminal organizations fight for territory across Mexico, seeking to ensure safe routes to smuggle migrants, drugs and guns, but also increasingly to extort communities.

Her administration has shown more willingness to go after criminal organizations than that of her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, but the hotspots stretch across the country. Factions of the Sinaloa cartel have been at war in Sinaloa's state capital for months.

The Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation cartels are fighting in a number of states ranging from central Michoacan to the southern state of Chiapas along the Guatemala border.

On Tuesday, body parts from an unknown number of victims were found along a highway in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco, as that state's governor announced the arrival of 180 soldiers to address the surging violence.

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