The Secretariat of the Mexican Navy (SEMAR) announced on Tuesday that it had arrested 54 people in several municipalities of Manzanillo, Colima. The operation, framed in the Pez Vela 2025 Security Strategy, identified the suspects as “violators” and seized weapons, cartridges, vehicles, property and drugs during the operations. “The detainees and seized objects have been made available to the competent authorities for the integration of the corresponding investigative files,” SEMAR said in a statement.
In Manzanillo, a coastal city much sought after by organized crime for its commercial port which gives access to traffic coming from the Pacific Ocean, the authorities have deployed personnel. The operation of the Secretariat of the Navy, in which elements of the Attorney General of the Republic, the Secretariat of Public Security of the State of Colima and the Directorate of Public Security of Manzanillo also participated, managed to capture more than fifty suspects. So far SEMAR has not provided details on who the detained people are or what charges they face, but assures that the authorities’ actions seek to “reduce the rate of violence and strengthen citizens’ security”.
In addition to the arrests, the Navy secured weapons, ammunition and narcotics, as detailed. In several neighborhoods of the municipalities of Manzanillo, Tecomán, Villa de Álvarez and Colima, agents seized handguns, homemade weapons, 18 knives, as well as a magazine and 17 cartridges. They also found 268 doses of methamphetamine and baggies of marijuana. In the five houses seized there were an antenna, two computers, as well as radio equipment, telephones, a truck reported stolen and eight motorcycles.
Last week, the governor of Colima, Indira Vizcaíno Silva, announced a strengthening of the security strategies for her state taking advantage of the Michoacán Plan created by the Federal Government after the murder of the mayor of Uruapan Carlos Manzo and the lemon producer Bernardo Bravo. “There are dislocations in the bordering areas between the entities of Michoacán and Colima, obviously trying to ensure that these actions carried out in the state of Michoacán do not have an impact in neighboring states, as is our case,” Vizcaíno said, explaining that there is an exchange of information between the prosecutors of the two states to coordinate the arrest of the alleged criminals.
A few days before the high-profile murders in Michoacán, the former PRI mayor of the municipality of Cuauhtémoc, Colima, Gabriela Mejía (2021-2024) was murdered in a drive-by shooting. The murder revealed that the state continues to be a territory dominated by organized crime, in particular by the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which unleashed a wave of terror in 2022. The prosecutor, Bryant Alejandro García Ramírez, revealed that Mejía had been in contact with armed groups before his death. “We discovered that the house where he lived belongs to a person linked to organized crime, who fled the municipality of Cuauhtémoc due to the acts of violence recorded in recent months,” he explained in a press conference last week. The authorities have not yet been able to find the perpetrators of the murder.
