Exchange of fire between gangs in a luxury tourist resort with two dead [video]

Two suspected drug traffickers were killed Thursday in an exchange of gunfire between members of rival gangs on a beach near Cancun, a tourist resort on the Caribbean coast of Mexico , prosecutors said.

There were no other “serious injuries”, according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office, which clarified that the exchange of fire broke out “between rival groups of drug traffickers” on a beach in Puerto Morelos.

“No tourist was seriously injured”

“No tourists were seriously injured and no one was abducted,” said Lucio Hernandez Gutierrez, a regional public security official.

The exchange of fire took place on the private beach of a luxury hotel.

Tourists and staff rushed to cover when the shootings began, according to a Twitter post by Mike Sington, an executive at NBC Universal, which is vacationing at the Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancún Resort.

Second incident in a few days

This is the second time in less than fifteen days that a Mexican tourist destination has been hit by a wave of violence attributed to drug-trafficking gangs.

Two young foreign tourists, a German and an Indian, were killed during an exchange of fire on October 21 in Tulum, also off the Mexican coast of the Caribbean on the Yucatan Peninsula. Two more German citizens and a Dutch woman were injured.

The tourists fell victim to a “clash” between two rival drug-trafficking gangs, the prosecutor’s office explained.

The 15th largest economy in the world, a country in the top ten in the world in terms of welcoming foreign visitors, thanks to its many tourist and cultural attractions, Mexico (covering an area of ​​almost two million square kilometers) is also in places where the indicators crime rates are frighteningly high.

In 2020, despite the new coronavirus pandemic, more than 36,000 homicides were officially counted by the Mexican authorities, most of which were linked to the clearing of accounts of so-called cartels, drug-trafficking gangs.