Shortly after 8 p.m. last Saturday, an assassin, wearing a white hoodie pulled over his head, exited the Hotel Alamada and walked about 50 metres to Plaza Morelos in the centre of Uruapan, a city in western Mexico branded as the avocado capital of the world.
His target: Mayor Carlos Manzo, who had risen to national prominence by loudly confronting the heavily armed organized crime groups who’ve unleashed violence throughout his region in power struggles over territory.
The assassin, carrying a 9-mm Beretta handgun, began weaving through crowds in the plaza, which included families with children, gathered for the Festival of Candles, part of the local Day of the Dead celebrations.
Surveillance video released by local authorities along with a timeline of events showed the assassin edging closer, homing in on Manzo, who was also dressed in white and accompanied by his wife and two children as he greeted people in the crowd.
When the assassin reached Manzo, he fired seven times before the mayor’s bodyguards — assigned by the federal government — responded, much too late, with lethal force.
Manzo’s killing triggered a spasm of fury that’s now fuelling protests across the fertile state of Michoacan, which produces limes and avocados found on Canadian grocery shelves. Uruapan, with a population of 400,000, is the state’s second-largest city.
Manzo was the seventh mayor killed in the state since 2022 and the second high-profile assassination in a two-week span. Bernardo Bravo, a prominent Michoacan lime grower and agricultural association president who spoke out against the extortion of producers by crime groups, was killed on Oct. 20.
Manzo’s assassination hit a raw nerve in Michoacan’s population, weary of the violence and impunity afflicting their lands, and that anger is now being felt 400 kilometres to the east, in Mexico City.
Francisco Garcia Davish, founder of Quadratin Mexico, a news agency founded in Michoacan with a presence in 22 Mexican states (as well as New Jersey), said he’s never witnessed the local population react this way to a political assassination.
“There have been protests in the streets, in public places, on social media — a multitude of people, of institutions and organizations that have never demonstrated following incidents like this,” said Garcia Davish in a telephone interview with CBC News from Morelia, the state capital of Michoacan.
He called it “a social rebellion.”
The level of violence in the demonstrations — in which state and municipal buildings were partially ransacked and torched — prompted Manzo’s widow to issue a video statement on social media this week calling for protests to remain peaceful.
“We are going to call for justice for Carlos, but I call on citizens who are protesting … who are falling into vandalism, I am asking you please, in the memory of Carlos, let’s do this in a peaceful way, a civilized way,” said Grecia Quiroz, who is replacing her slain husband as Uruapan’s mayor.
‘An honest, brave mayor’
Stability in Michoacan was shattered long ago following waves of militarized operations launched by successive federal governments and aimed at destroying established cartels in the region, experts say.
The results left splintered armed factions battling for territory in shifting alliances with the country’s most powerful crime group, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), which moved in to control the lucrative extortion rackets around the bountiful agricultural sector and the transportation routes for cocaine shipments transiting up the Pacific Coast from Colombia and Ecuador.
Alberto Islas, founder of Mexico City- and Miami-based consulting firm Global Leading Solutions, said the groups also battle over the control of municipal officials.
“At the end of the day, there’s a lack of presence of the state because everybody is receiving bribes,” he said.
Manzo was different, said David Saucedo, a security consultant in Mexico City.
“Most municipal governments, the mayors, submit to criminal powers. Carlos Manzo was an exception: an honest, brave mayor who decided to confront, with limited resources, organized crime groups,” said Saucedo.
Manzo’s ‘Movimiento del Sombrero’
Federal lawmaker Guadalupe Araceli Mendoza Arias, who represents the district of Uruapan in Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies, said her hands trembled as she prayed watching her husband, a top aide to Manzo, try to administer first aid to the fallen mayor in the chaotic aftermath of Saturday’s killing.
Mendoza Arias said she was “shoulder to shoulder” with Manzo during the plaza walkabout shortly before she heard the crack of gunshots.
“It scared me, I ran … I turned to look and I saw that he had fallen,” she said in an interview with CBC News from Uruapan.
“I moved to a spot farther away from danger, and I started praying, ‘My god, my god, please, don’t take him, you can’t take our leader … this social justice fighter.’”
Mendoza Arias said Manzo’s death won’t stop her from following his legacy and work.
“In this world, we are all going to die sooner or later. We are not eternal. No one escapes death. If I am going to die, I’ll die trying to help others, to make a difference, to leave this imprint in others, in the world, like Carlos Manzo left his imprint,” she said.
Mendoza Arias said she looked at Manzo’s face during his wake this week and said she could see a slight smile on his face.
“It was like he was saying, ‘I left my imprint, I know this will continue. My path has ended here, now it’s up to the movement,'” she said.
“Now we have to end the insecurity, the corruption, all the garbage that we have in this country.”
The two were part of what’s called “El Movimiento del Sombrero,” or Movement of the Hat, named after the cowboy hat Manzo always wore. The movement, which espouses a tough-on-crime, anti-corruption and family values agenda, also holds two municipal seats in Uruapan.
Manzo was seen by many as a potential governor of Michoacan. Mendoza Arias said he had his eye on a presidential bid — a significant challenge in a country where the established parties dominate the electoral battle for the National Palace.
Mendoza Arias, a former member of Mexico’s Green Party, ran and lost against Manzo when he took the federal district during the 2021 election as a candidate for the National Regeneration Movement Party (Morena).
Morena currently holds the presidency, along with majorities in both federal houses and most of the country’s governorships — including Michoacan.
In 2024, Manzo broke with Morena and won the mayorship of Uruapan as an independent. Mendoza Arias, by then a political ally, took the federal seat from Morena and she now sits as the only independent in the lower house.
Took down top cartel leader
Manzo employed aggressive tactics in the battle with crime groups in his city and authorized municipal police to use lethal force in their operations, said Saucedo.
“What Carlos Manzo promoted was to kill the narco-traffickers, to kill organized crime groups,” said Saucedo.
“To me, his assassination…. was done to prevent more Carlos Manzos, to dissuade the other mayors of Michoacan from confronting cartels.”
In August, Manzo’s police force arrested René Belmonte Aguilar, nicknamed “El Rino,” the top member of the CJNG in Uruapan — an operation Manzo streamed on his Facebook page to more than one million followers.
Saucedo said the CJNG may have been behind the assassination as an act of revenge. Or it may have been executed by a rival group to “heat up the plaza,” draw in state and federal forces to weaken the CJNG, he said.
Michoacan state authorities are currently leading the probe into Manzo’s killing.
Michoacan Gov. Alfredo Ramirez Bedolla said during a press conference this week that authorities believed an organized crime group was behind the political hit, but would not say which ones were suspected.
State authorities have the body of the killer, but say they don’t know his name.
During the same press conference, State Attorney General Carlos Torres Piña said autopsy results determined the killer to be between 17 and 19 years of age and that he had been high on methamphetamines and THC. Ballistics tests determined his weapon was previously used to kill three people in two separate incidents last month, Torres Piña said.
His office released several images of the killer’s tattoos, which included etchings of Hello Kitty and a demon face breathing fire.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her government was developing a plan to bring “peace and justice” to Michoacan. However, Sheinbaum said she would not be relaunching the type of “narco war” deployed by her predecessors between 2006 and 2018, which left tens of thousands dead and missing, combatants and innocents alike.
“It didn’t work,” said Sheinbaum.
Former president Felipe Calderon launched the opening salvo in the narco war in 2006. His first target was Michoacan. This eventually led to the destruction of the dominant cartel in the state known as the Michoacan Family, said Saucedo.
After some internecine fighting among splinter groups, power consolidated under an organization called the Knight’s Templar, which established a presence in all of Michoacan’s municipalities, said Garcia Davish.
Calderon’s successor as president, Enrique Peña Nieto, launched his own narco war, which destroyed the Templar’s command structure, creating a power vacuum. Garcia Davish said there are now an estimated 30 splinter groups — some aligned with the CJNG, some battling it — operating across the state.
“To this day, Michoacan has been gripped by an interminable civil war between narcotrafficking groups,” said Saucedo.
