Mob in Mexico beats kidnapping suspect before Holy Week procession

A woman suspected of kidnapping and killing of a young girl is dragged from a police vehicle by a mob in Taxco, Mexico.

By FERNANDA PESCE

March 29, 2024 10:26 AM PT

TAXCO, Mexico — A mob in Taxco beat a woman to death because she was suspected of kidnapping and killing a young girl, rampaging just hours before the Mexican tourist city’s famous Holy Week procession.

The 8-year-old girl disappeared Wednesday. Her body was found on a road on the outskirts of Taxco early Thursday. Security camera video appeared to show a woman and a man loading a bundle, which may have been the girl’s body, into a taxi.

A mob surrounded the woman’s house Thursday, threatening to drag her out. Officers took the woman into the bed of a police pickup truck but then stood by — apparently intimidated by the crowd — as members of the mob dragged her out of the truck and onto the street, where they stomped, kicked and pummeled her until she lay partly stripped and motionless.

Police then took her away, leaving the pavement stained with blood.

The Guerrero state prosecutors’ office later confirmed that the woman died from her injuries.

“This is the result of the bad government we have,” said a member of the mob, Andrea, who refused to give her last name. “This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened,” she said, referring to the murder of the girl, “but this is the first time the people have done something.”

“We are fed up,” she added. “This time it was an 8-year-old girl.”

The mayor of Taxco, Mario Figueroa, said he shared residents’ outrage over the killing.

Figueroa said three people beaten by the mob — the woman, as well as two men — had been taken away by police. Video from the scene suggests that the men had also been beaten, although the Associated Press witnessed only the beating of the woman.

The state prosecutors’ office said the two men had been hospitalized. There was no immediate information on their condition.

In a statement issued soon after the killing, Figueroa complained that he did not receive help from the state government for his small, outnumbered municipal police force.

“Unfortunately, up to now, we have not received any help or answers,” Figueroa said.

Taxco’s Good Friday eve religious procession, which dates back centuries in the silver-mining town, went on as planned Thursday night.

People crowded Taxco’s colonial streets to watch hooded men whipping themselves or carrying heavy bundles of thorns across their bare shoulders to emulate the suffering of Jesus Christ carrying the cross.

But the earlier flash of violence cast a pall over the already solemn procession, which draws thousands to the small town.

Many participants wore white ribbons of mourning.

“I never thought that in a touristic place like Taxco we would experience a lynching,” said Felipa Lagunas, a local elementary school teacher. “I saw it as something distant, in places far from civilization. ... I never imagined that my community would experience this on such a special day.”

Mob attacks in rural Mexico are not uncommon.

In 2018, two men were torched by an angry crowd in the central state of Puebla, and the next day a man and woman were dragged from their vehicle, beaten and set afire in the neighboring state of Hidalgo.

But Taxco and other cities in Guerrero state have been particularly prone to violence.

In late January, Taxco endured a days-long strike by private taxi and van drivers who suffered threats from one of several drug gangs that are fighting for control of the area. The situation was so bad that police had to give people rides in the back of their patrol vehicles.

Around the same time, the bullet-ridden bodies of two detectives were found on the outskirts of Taxco. Reports in local media said the bodies showed signs of torture.

In February, Figueroa’s own bulletproof car was shot up by gunmen on motorcycles.

In Taxco and throughout Guerrero state, drug cartels and gangs routinely prey on the population, demanding protection payments from store owners and taxi and bus drivers. They kill those who refuse to pay.

Residents have said they have had enough. They took matters into their own hands despite knowing that the violence may further hurt tourism to the city.

“We know the town lives off of Holy Week [tourism] and that this is going to mess it up. There will be a lot of people who won’t want to come anymore,” said Andrea, the woman who was in the mob. “We make our living off tourism, but we cannot continue to allow them to do these things to us.”

Pesce writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report.