An armed attack during a wake in the city of Celaya, in the state of Guanajuato, central Mexico, left at least nine people dead, local authorities said on Thursday.
The incident took place around 9pm (03.00 GMT) in a house located in the Arboretum district of San Rafael, where the vigil was being held, the Celaya Public Security Secretariat reported.
Heavily armed subjects arrived at the scene and fired at the attendees.
According to local authorities, the balance of the assault was nine people dead, all of them male, and one more was injured.
The massacre led to the mobilization of security agents from all three levels of government; however, no arrests have been made so far.
This is the second massacre of 2021 to take place in Guanajuato, an entity with about 6 million inhabitants and located in the central region of Mexico.
Just on January 4, in the municipality of León, five people who were in a department were shot dead., Four died on the spot and one more died while being treated at the hospital.
Both facts are a reflection of the violence that has intensified in Guanajuato since 2018, an entity that since this year concentrates the largest number of malicious homicides in the country.
This, according to local authorities, is the product of the dispute between different organized crime groups, mainly the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel.
Nine out of 10 murders would be linked to this phenomenon, according to the Secretary of State for Public Security, Alvar Cap de Vaca.
Official figures state that in 2020, as of November, 4,190 people were killed in Guanajuato, 1,547 more cases than the second-highest homicide, which is the tourist state of Baja California.
Meanwhile, at the national level, federal authorities estimate that at the end of 2020, 34,523 people were killed, which would represent a decrease of 0.4 percent compared to 2019, the year in which the homicides malicious people recorded the record number of 34,648 victims.