Colonel Jose Isidro Grimaldo assassinated in Jalisco, the second attack against a military command in the last month

Colonel of the Mexican Army Jose Isidro Grimaldo has been found dead this Wednesday in Guadalajara. Grimaldo had disappeared a few days ago, when he was traveling from Jalisco to Zacatecas. The soldier was on vacation. Apparently, the authorities have found his beaten body, as reported by the journalist Ciro Gomez Leyva. Neither the Secretary of National Defense nor the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic have informed about it.

Grimaldo, who until May commanded an Army barracks in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, is the second military commander assassinated in a few weeks in the center of the country, an escalation rarely seen in these years of violence. At the end of November, hitmen fired on a National Guard convoy, in which General Jose Silvestre Urzua was traveling, who coordinated the National Guard in Zacatecas. The attack occurred after the National Guard carried out an operation at the police station in the municipality of Pinos.

Unlike the case of Urzua, it is unknown so far if there are any detainees or clues in the Grimaldo case. Authorities found his car in Tonala, with broken windows, but it is not clear how far it was from his body. Instead, the federal government reported a few days ago the arrest or death of several members of the Jalisco Nueva Generacion Cartel (CJNG) cell that would have attacked the general.

As is the case or has occurred in States such as Guanajuato or Morelos, the situation in Zacatecas worsens as the months go by. It is the entity in the country that has the most police officers murdered this year —54—, with a homicide rate skyrocketing —more than 100 per 100,000 inhabitants last year— where high-impact murders have occurred in recent weeks, without so far a solution is guessed on the horizon.

At the beginning of the month, hitmen murdered a control judge in the entity, who was in charge of attending the first stages of the judicial processes. The judge, Roberto Elias Martinez, 50, lived in Guadalupe, a neighboring municipality of the capital Zacatecas. The assassins caught up with him in the morning, when he was leaving his house. They shot him several times and fled. At the moment it is not known who and why he could have been behind the attack.

A common argument in regions gripped by crime, in Zacatecas many attribute the current violence to a struggle between the Sinaloa cartel and the CJNG. Whether true or not, it is an argument that is replicated in other regions of the country, with these or other acronyms. The problem with this explanation is that it leaves in the background the networks of corruption woven around the groups that exercise violence, always dependent on political power and local budgets.

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