Seven young people who were killed at the church event

Seven Mexican young people were shot at a festival organized by the Catholic Church in the central state of Guanajuato.

Gunmen opened the fire on a group of people organized after an event organized by the local community on the central square of the village of San Bartolo de Berrios.

Eyewitnesses said that the attackers drove directly to the village square in the early morning of the Monday and apparently dozens of Schüussen randomly fired.

The authorities have not yet said what the motive may have been behind the shootings, but news that were crowned back at several nearby locations, seem to indicate that it was carried out by the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel.

While attacks on night clubs, bars and cocks fighting in Mexican countries that are affected by antitrust violence are not unusual, an attack on an event organized by the Catholic Church is rare.

The Episcopal Conference of Mexico, which represents the country's bishops, condemned the deadly shootout, in which she said that it “cannot remain indifferent in view of the spiral of violence that so many communities wounded”.

The local archbishop Jaime Calderón also published a statement in which the attack on a struggle for the area between competing cartels was responsible.

Guanajuato, where San Bartolo de Berrios is located, had the highest number of murders in a state in Mexico in 2024 with a total of 2,597 murders.

Both the Jalalco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel are active in the state and were locked up in a fatal struggle for control over the territory.

While the two groups run blackmail and drug trafficking, they also have increasingly canceled pipelines that carry the state with petrol from refineries to important distribution points.

The practice of theft and sales of fuel on the black market – known as Huachicoleo – is an important source of income for the criminal gangs in the region.

In their struggle for territorial control, the gangs often try to spread fear in the middle of the local population in order to ensure their silence and compliance.

Bloody shootings such as those in San Bartolo de Berrios and the subsequent display of threatening messages are a particularly brutal way, as gangs show that they are expanded to a certain city.

Residents of San Bartolo de Berrios said that they would ring around 100 shots in the early morning of the Monday within a few minutes.

They said that the scene on the central square resembled “a bloodbath” with the bodies of the seven young people, two of them under the age of 18, over the sidewalk.

So far, no arrests have been made in connection with the attack.