At 6 a.m. on Wednesday, as the sun rose over the mountains of central Mexico, cartel drones began dropping bombs on a cluster of rural communities known as Guajes de Ayala.
For weeks, residents of those communities had been reaching out to law enforcement in the state of Guerrero, alerting them to growing threats from the advancing cartel La Nueva Familia Michoacana. But those warnings were ignored as World Cup celebrations dominated major cities including Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey.
Twenty-four-year-old Marilu Solorio found herself huddled inside a nearby abandoned medical clinic alongside 70 other women, children, and elderly residents, listening to the relentless sounds of drone explosions and gunfire as the cartel clashed with the community’s self-defense group.
“While some are celebrating goals, others are getting massacred by drones carrying bombs,” Solorio said by phone from her makeshift shelter. “Instead of protecting people in the places where they’ve been playing the World Cup, (Mexico’s government) should be protecting people like us, who have never done anything wrong.”
Mexican authorities quickly moved to deny the attacks were happening in the violence-plagued Guerrero region — even as locals livestreamed video showing gunfire and plumes of smoke rising from mountain lookout posts residents had established to watch for cartel movements.
The violence erupted amid months of effort by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to confront widespread criminal violence across the country. While homicide rates have dropped under her leadership, pressure has intensified over the past year as Mexico worked to present an image of safety and stability ahead of the World Cup. That pressure was compounded by a wave of violence in February in the host city of Guadalajara, along with threats from U.S. President Donald Trump to take military action against cartels and various internal political tensions.
In response, Mexico deployed 100,000 security personnel primarily to the three World Cup host cities — Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara. The portion of the tournament held in Mexico concluded Sunday without any major security incidents.
But while soccer fans filled city streets and social media buzzed with celebration, cartel violence continued unabated in many other parts of the country.
Mexican security analyst David Saucedo connected the Guajes de Ayala attacks to the government’s World Cup security approach.
“There was heavy security in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey. Lots of military and National Guard officers from other states were transferred to fortify World Cup hosts,” Saucedo said. “But in doing that, they also left a number of regions that weren’t host cities unprotected.”
Violence elsewhere in the country underscored the point. In northern Sinaloa, weekend clashes between criminal organizations left one naval officer and 10 suspected gang members dead. The previous week, authorities in southern Veracruz announced the discovery of the body of a kidnapped journalist, believed to have been killed by criminal groups. On Wednesday in Chiapas — a southern state increasingly gripped by cartel power struggles — eight bodies were found together bearing cartel messages.
Residents of Guajes de Ayala had not only called authorities with their concerns but also posted videos online showing cartel drones flying over their community and tracking the movement of cartel fighters approaching their homes. They feared an attack was imminent. According to Solorio, no assistance ever came.
When the assault finally began Wednesday morning, Solorio and her group took cover in the abandoned clinic while others fled to local churches for shelter.
Local and federal officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. However, after the Associated Press reached out for information, Mexico’s Security Cabinet posted on the social media platform X stating that “events described in news articles have been ruled out” by authorities. The post also said state security forces were heading to the area to assess conditions and bolster their presence.
Authorities had previously rejected claims that they abandoned the Guerrero communities, but a recent visit to the region by the AP found no state security presence anywhere near the affected communities.
La Nueva Familia Michoacana has been pushing deeper into Guerrero for years. The Trump administration designated the cartel — along with other Mexican cartels and several Central and South American gangs — as a foreign terrorist organization last year.
Faced with ongoing attacks and what residents described as an absence of government protection, hundreds of people have fled their homes in recent years. Men remaining in the community formed a vigilante group to defend against the cartel. That group was armed by rival cartels competing with La Nueva Familia Michoacana for territory, and carried military-grade weapons smuggled from the United States, grenades, and drones used to track the encroaching cartel’s movements.
For the people of Guerrero, a region long scarred by warring criminal factions, residents have said for years that another attack was never a matter of if — only when.
