Police chief shot dead days after activist, wife and daughter killed in Mexico

Mexico City’s police operations chief was killed in the capital on Sunday just three days after an Indigenous rights defender and his family were killed in the country, authorities said — the latest in a series of attacks targeting police, activists and politicians across Mexico.

“As a result of a cowardly attack that occurred in Coacalco, Mexico State, my colleague and friend Chief Commissioner Milton Morales Figueroa lost his life,” a local security secretary Pablo Vazquez said on social media, vowing to “identify, arrest and bring those responsible to justice.”

The officer, who was in charge of intelligence operations fighting organized crime, was outside a poultry store when he was accosted by a man who shot him, according to security camera footage.

“Milton was in charge of important investigative tasks to protect the peace and security of the residents of Mexico City,” Mayor Marti Batres wrote on social media.

Small drug trafficking and smuggling cells operating in the megacity are connected to some of the country’s powerful drug cartels such as the powerful Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG).

The Jalisco cartel is better known for producing millions of doses of deadly fentanyl and smuggling them into the United States disguised to look like Xanax, Percocet or oxycodone. Such pills cause about 70,000 overdose deaths per year in the United States.

Local media reported that Figueroa’s work had helped dismantle some gangs.

While several police chiefs have been targeted in other Mexican states plagued by criminal violence recent years, attacks against authorities in the capital have been rare.

Activist, wife and daughter murdered

A Mexican Indigenous rights defender was killed alongside his wife and daughter when unknown assailants riddled their car with bullets and set it ablaze, a prosecutor’s office said Friday.

Lorenzo Santos Torres, 53, and his family were traveling in a pickup truck along a highway in the southern state of Oaxaca when they were intercepted and shot on Thursday.

The attackers then set fire to the vehicle with the passengers inside, the state prosecutor’s office said.

“We condemn the violent way in which the crime was committed,” state prosecutor Bernardo Rodriguez Alamilla told reporters, suggesting the attack could have been motivated by “revenge.”

Santos Torres was an active human rights campaigner in Oaxaca.

According to the local Center for Human Rights and Advice to Indigenous Peoples (Cedhapi), the activist had received threats for his work defending the political, social and land rights of Indigenous communities.

“Lorenzo Santos Torres opposed injustices committed by the municipal authorities of Santiago Amoltepec (town),” said Cedhapi, calling for the killers to be punished.

Several human rights activists have been murdered in recent years in Mexico, which has long grappled with violence linked to drug trafficking and ancestral disputes over agricultural land.

The country of 126 million people has seen more than 450,000 people murdered since the government of then-president Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive against drug cartels in 2006.