Two municipal government officials from Ayutla in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero were killed on Tuesday night on a federal road connecting the state's Centro and Costa Chica regions, social organizations reported on Wednesday. With these two murders, the number of local government officials killed this week rises to four. The victims were the Commissioner of Public Works, Tomás Augusto Lozano Analco, and the accountant Francisco Bonilla, members of the Community Municipal Council of Ayutla, a government elected by customs and traditions. They were attacked on the Tierra Colorada-Cruz Grande highway, near the Omitlán bridge, while returning from a meeting in Chilpancingo. The bodies were taken to the Forensic Medical Service (Semefo) in the city of Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, where they were guarded by agents of the National Guard and the State Attorney General's Office (FGE) while relatives identified and claimed the bodies. The security operation, which also includes police from the municipality in civilian clothes, continues while the bodies are at the funeral home that will transport them to the municipality. The attack on the officials of Ayutla's so-called Casa de los Pueblos took place in the context of armed tension between community police from the Union of Peoples and Organizations of the State of Guerrero (Upoeg) and the Indigenous and Popular Council of Guerrero Emiliano Zapata (Cipog-EZ) against the criminal group 'Los Ardillos', whom they accuse of displacing communities. On May 30, the self-defense groups entered the town of Tierra Colorada under the pretext of expelling 'Los Ardillos'; therefore, commissioners and inhabitants of that municipality and the Valle del Ocotito blocked the Sun Highway to demand the advance be stopped, and linked them to the group known as 'Los Rusos'. Since then, armed polarization persists in the area. The last reported attack was just on March 1, when the community members of Upoeg and Cipog-EZ claimed they were attacked by 'Los Ardillos'. The other attack against local Guerrero officials occurred on Monday on the Chilapa-Tlapa highway, where the director of Health for the municipality of Atlixtac, Jessica Macedonio Saldaña, and another official from the same municipality, identified as Fulgencio Salgado Sánchez, were killed. Regarding this, the Undersecretary of Political and Social Development for the Guerrero government, Francisco Rodríguez Cisneros, ruled out that the murders are political matters and attributed them to 'the phenomenon of violence that is experienced at the national level'.
