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The Sunday Read: ‘Who Hired the Hitmen to Silence Zitácuaro?’

The Sunday Read: ‘Who Hired the Hitmen to Silence Zitácuaro?’

The Daily vor 3 Jahren

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54:59

On Oct. 19, 2021, Armando Linares López was writing up notes from
an interview when his cellphone buzzed with an unknown number.
Linares, 49 and stocky with black hair that was just starting to
show gray streaks, ran an online news site in a small Mexican
city called Zitácuaro. He knew his beat so intimately that calls
from unfamiliar phone numbers were rare.

But the man on the other end spoke in a way that was instantly
familiar. Linares had come to know that pitched, menacing tone
from years of run-ins with every kind of Mexican gangster.

“This is Commander Eagle,” the voice said. “I’m from the Jalisco
New Generation Cartel.”

Zitácuaro, in the hills of the state of Michoacán, had for years
mostly been known for its fertile avocado orchards and the
pine-oak forest where tourists came to see the annual arrival of
the monarch butterflies. But its central location had made it
increasingly attractive to the drug trade. Farmers grew marijuana
and opium poppy, the source of heroin, in nearby mountains, and
in recent years international drug cartels had been using
Michoacán as a way station for methamphetamine and fentanyl
shipments. Linares’s rise as a journalist coincided with the drug
boom, and he watched its devastating effects on Zitácuaro:
severed heads dumped in front of a car dealership, business
owners kidnapped for ransom and a government that seemed
unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

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