Senior Official: “Tourist Zone Unaffected by Violence”
(Acapulco, ElSur 5 May) Guerrero’s Secretary-General for Government, Humberto Salgado Gómez, said here yesterday that the violent executions that have taken place in the last few days within the state are limited to organized crime figures. He called upon the media not to give in to the temptation to print sensationalism. He was confident that social programs being implemented will eventually bear fruit, “not in any magic way, but rather gradually, as we are able to get behind programs that permeate through the general population.”
Salgado Gómez was in Acapulco for the swearing in of Arturo Deloya Fonseca as the new director of the Fideicomiso Acapulco, a government trust for promoting the city’s tourism industry. Salgado Gómez celebrated the fact that “the acts of violence do not occur in the tourist zone.” He asked the media to emphasize that the murders have not affected the tourist population, but rather have been between organized criminal gangs that fight each other for turf. “Things are now beginning to improve,” he said, “and we don’t want yellow journalism to be what people remember about us.”
Meanwhile, five persons were killed in and around Acapulco during the day: Two were killed and another was injured in a gunfight while they were washing buses in a rough neighborhood of Y Griega, around 11:00 pm yesterday. Another died from gunshot wounds in an outlying village, and two were found executed near Pie de la Cuesta. They had been bound and gagged. A “narco message” was left with their bodies. Finally, one man was shot three times with a .45mm pistol, twice in the head and once in the chest, as he was driving his SUV through the middle of the Costa Azul section of town. It was around 10:30 in the morning. Undeniably, the murder occurred inside the tourist zone, near hotels and restaurants. To be sure, the victim was not a tourist, but rather a construction executive, and the murder had all the earmarks of a mob “hit.” But it all took place within a few hundred yards of the beach, on Horacio Nelson, near the bar formerly called Motown. No tourists were affected by the incident, but it is unsettling for violence to appear so close to the bay and the beaches.
