A confrontation between two gangs for control of a territory was the cause of the shooting on a beach in Puerto Morelos in the Riviera Maya, one of the jewels of the Mexican Caribbean, where 12 groups have been detected operating of drug dealing. state authorities indicated on Friday.
READ ALSO : Two people killed in shooting at a hotel in Cancun, Mexico
After the dramatic hours that hundreds of tourists lived, mostly foreigners, when on Thursday afternoon 15 armed men entered through the parking lot of a hotel in the area and in the middle of the Petempich Bay beach, they shot at two members of a rival group, the beautiful coastal town of Puerto Morelos, with turquoise waters and white sands, returned to tranquility.
Authorities are advancing in the investigation to try to identify the two people who died in the violent events that occurred on a beach near the Azul Beach Resort and Hyatt Ziva hotels, the attorney general of the southern state of Quintana Roo, Oscar, said on Friday. Montes de Oca.
Investigations by the authorities suggest that the shooting was generated by a confrontation between two gangs dedicated to drug dealing that are fighting for control of the territory in Puerto Morelos, which is about 50 kilometers south of Cancun.
In this regard, Montes de Oca specified that in Puerto Morelos it has been identified that there are “two groups that are fighting each other” while in the town of Tulum, also located in the Riviera Maya, approximately “10 groups of drug dealers” are operating.
“We are dealing with a matter of demand and supply of drugs,” said the prosecutor when speaking of the two violent incidents that have occurred in 15 days in Puerto Morelos and Tulum and admitted, in statements to the local radio station Imagen Radio, that these events ” they hurt the tourist destination ”.
On the night of October 20, there was a shooting at a restaurant in Tulum, some 100 kilometers south of Puerto Morelos, also due to a confrontation between drug dealing gangs that left two foreign tourists dead and three others injured. Nine people have been arrested in the case.
The prosecutor said that the state of Quinta Roo, where Cancun and the Riviera Maya are located, about 140,000 tourists arrive weekly and added that the large flow of visitors is an attraction for investors “but also for criminal groups, and they are also beginning to approach They begin to want to invade areas and impose themselves with their structures ”.
After the violent events that occurred in Puerto Morelos, the United States embassy in Mexico issued an alert on its Twitter account on Thursday, in which it asked its citizens to take extreme precautions in the place where they are and to follow the instructions of the authorities. local.
In the Riviera Maya, the paradise visited by thousands of tourists each year and which was now beginning to recover after the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation seems to have gotten out of control because gangs linked to the Gulf cartel and the cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, among other groups, are fighting for control of the retail drug sale not in marginal areas of the periphery of Cancun, as was usual, but on the beach and among the most exclusive hotels.
In June two men were shot and killed on the beach in Tulum and a third person was injured.
In the nearby city of Playa del Carmen, the police carried out a massive raid in October in which they arrested 26 people – apparently the majority for selling drugs – after a local policewoman was shot to death and her body put in the trunk of a vehicle.
Crime “has risen a bit in terms of extortion, in the sale of narcotics to foreigners or to nationals themselves,” the prosecution said in a statement at the time.
The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has great expectations for Tulum, where it has among its plans to build an international airport and a stop for the Mayan Train, which will travel through the Yucatan Peninsula.