Sawt Falasteen - Bodies hanging from bridge revive violence in once-calm town in Mexico

These days in Pozos de Gamboa, a Zacatecas town of 5,000 that is known for growing beans, people are terrified. No one goes out after dark and no one talks about that morning when the bodies showed up.

Zacatecas is key to the drug trade because it links central Mexico with the north and west of the country and features routes that are key to smuggling cocaine and drugs north to the hungry consumer market in the United States.

The state of 1.6 million people had become painfully used to narcotics-related violence as rival gangs fought each other, with bodies turning up almost on a daily basis and people going missing right and left.

Then things calmed down, a lot. Killings in Zacatecas fell from around 1,300 in 2022 to 144 in 2025, according to government figures. The government has attributed the decline to better coordination between state and federal law enforcement officials.

The calm spell ended shockingly on July 18 with the spectacle of the bodies hanging from the bridge. The victims included a former mayor, civil servants and business people from other parts of the state. Five other bodies were found elsewhere in town that same day.

Mexico's two largest drug cartels -- Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa -- have been fighting to control Zacatecas because of its strategic value in the US-bound drug trade.

- 'They kill over nothing' -

Prosecutors opened a probe into the killings and the state government promised "an immediate and forceful response," while noting that violence like this had been on the decline. It asked for help from the army and the National Guard to boost security in Zacatecas.

AFP visited Pozos de Gamboa and observed that on the road here from the state capital, also called Zacatecas, there were no roadblocks and just a few police patrol cars out and about.

One Pozos de Gamboa resident who declined to be named, fearing for his safety, described it as being like a ghost town -- "as if no one ever lived here."

"Here, you always used to see people," this man said. But now, "at 9 in the evening there is no one out on the street."

Indeed, in this town most people have lost a relative or an acquaintance -- dead or missing -- to all the drug violence.

When people go missing they are routinely killed, this man said. "They make it so the bodies do not smell."

"They killed a brother of ours," he added. "They kill over nothing at all."

The bridge where the bodies were found last month had been used in the past as a spot for the drug cartels to leave these grim messages.

A woman who runs a food stall in the street said she saw the bodies hanging as early 4 am.

The image recalled the worst years of Mexico's drug wars, when the government deployed federal forces in 2006 to fight the cartels and these crime gangs fought back, hanging bodies from bridges or dumping them elsewhere in public to intimidate rivals and the security forces.

The Pozos de Gamboa killings drew the attention of leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum's government, which promised to arrest whoever was behind them.

She has deployed soldiers in violence-plagued states such as Sinaloa and Michoacan as she endures pressure from US President Donald Trump to intervene directly in Mexico against the cartels so as to keep drugs from crossing the border into the United States.

Q.Jaber--SF-PST