La Jornada reports that close to police in the Mexican city of Culiacán arrested close to 200 people on Sunday during a crackdown on the second march held in the city to call for the release of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the recently captured Sinaloa drug cartel boss. At least 20 of the estimated 1,500 protestors were reportedly beaten by police, some of whom wore masks to protect their identity in a city which has long been a hotbed of Sinaloa cartel influence. One young woman told the paper, “If they don’t let [El Chapo] go, we’re going to starve,” adding that in Sinaloa, “we all depend on el narco.”
Daniel Gaxiola, spokesman for the Sinaloa public security secretariat, told Excelsior that almost all of the detained protestors had been arrested for disturbing the peace after police and members of the Mexican military tried to disperse them. Authorities had informed protestors that their march was against a law prohibiting apology for crime, said Gaxiola, who noted that they had organized near the church named after Sinaloa folk saint Jesús Malverde, widely known as a patron saint of drug traffickers.
La Jornada wrote in a separate article that at least three reporters from the local daily Noroeste had been beaten by state and local police while reporting on the protests. One of the reporters said his camera had been confiscated by authorities who saw him taking photographs of spent cartridges after police allegedly fired shots. “We’re going to investigate,” said Sinaloa governor Mario “Malova” López Valdés on Sunday afterward. The governor denied that the reporters’ freedom of expression had been infringed upon, adding that while he knew shots had been fired, he didn’t think police had been responsible.
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