Mexico's most dangerous city for police refuses to give up or negotiate with cartels
A dead man lay on his back in the parking lot of a convenience store in late February when journalists rolled in to the north-central Mexico city of Celaya to interview police. A spray of bullet casings and spent projectiles lay around the corpse, a sight all too common in Guanajuato state, which has Mexico’s highest number of homicides.
A policeman had been driving his wife to work on Feb. 28 when cartel gunmen — who had apparently followed from them home — opened fire on their car. The policeman killed one attacker before dying.
His wife and 1-year-old daughter were unharmed. But a week earlier, cartel gunmen shot a police officer to death while she took her 8-year-old daughter to school. They killed the girl, too.
Welcome to Celaya, arguably the most dangerous place, per capita, to be. At least 34 police officers have been killed in this city of 500,000 people in the last three years. In Guanajuato state, its population just over 6 million, more police were shot to death in 2023 — about 60 — than in all of the United States.
