By Agence France-Presse
On Tuesday, May 21, gunmen riding a motorcycle shot dead two members of the Mexico City mayor’s team in a rush hour double murder that President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned as “deplorable.”
Clara Brugada, who holds one of the country’s most important political positions, called the killing of her personal secretary Ximena Guzman and advisor Jose “Pepe” Muñoz a “direct attack.”
Authorities were investigating the motive and checking surveillance camera footage to identify the perpetrators, the mayor said.
“There will be no impunity. Those responsible will be arrested and must face justice,” Brugada added.
At a somber press conference, she vowed her administration would continue “its relentless fight against insecurity” and held a minute’s silence for the victims.
Forensic experts were seen gathering evidence at the scene of the crime on a busy avenue as police officers stood guard. A body covered in a white sheet lay on the ground near the victims’ car, whose windows were shattered.
Close allies
Guzman and Muñoz were both members of Sheinbaum’s Morena party, which also governs Mexico City.
Brugada is a close ally of Sheinbaum, who was herself mayor of the city of nine million people before becoming president last year.
“It’s a deplorable incident,” Sheinbaum said, pledging her full support to Brugada and her team.
She expressed her condolences and said Guzman and Muñoz had worked for her political movement for years.
“With the support of the Mexican government, investigations are already under way to determine the motive for the attack,” Sheinbaum said.
‘Cowardly act’
Around 480,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since 2006.
Despite growing drug cartel violence elsewhere in the Latin American nation, the capital has remained calmer than many areas.
While politicians and their aides, particularly at the local level, often get caught up in gang-related crime in other areas, such murders on the streets of Mexico City are relatively rare.
In one notable incident, Mexico City security chief Omar Garcia Harfuch survived an attack by heavily armed perpetrators who killed two of his bodyguards and a passerby in the street in June 2020.
Garcia Harfuch was wounded in the shooting, which he blamed on the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the drug trafficking groups that were recently designated as terrorist organizations by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Last July, Mexico City’s police special operations chief, Milton Figueroa, was murdered.
Garcia Harfuch, who is now Sheinbaum’s national security minister, said his office was helping search for the perpetrators behind Tuesday’s attack (May 20).
“We will not let this cowardly act go unpunished,” he wrote on X.
