All calm on the western front

Things have been quiet in San Carlos lately. No drug shoot outs on the streets for months! The city of Guaymas bought a couple of cheap white cars and put police signs on them and they have patrolled the streets at night and during the day so I would suspect that Guaymas would argue that they have done a good job security-wise in the area and that is why it has been calm here lately. I would conjecture that it is just as likely that the powers that be have negotiated some type of truce on murdering people in a tourist town or it is simply just luck. Regardless of the reasons it has been a few months, mas o menus, since the last shooting occurred here. Guaymas/Empalme is another story altogether different. There have been so many murders, kidnapping and disappearances that it is just too much to keep up with. Just last week two people were killed in Guaymas. On the 16th of September a gentleman received two shots to the head just seconds after purchasing a cup of coffee from  El Caffenio in Guaymas, a place I have been in at least twice and driven by countless hundreds of times over the last few years . The victim was found to be caring a hand gun and the killer ran into the Delicias neighborhood and then hopped in a car and drove away. Two days later there was another drive by shooting on 30th street, close to Bellas Artes in Guaymas. One man was working on a pick up truck with three other buddies who were standing around drinking beer and watching when a car drove by and two passengers, one with an automatic riffle the other with a pistol, shot the mechanic and injured the three other bystanders in a hail of bullets. Two dead in two days once again in Guaymas. San Carlos is the same municipality as Guaymas so, statistically speaking anyway, those murders might as well have occurred in San Carlos.

Even though there have been no killing’s in San Carlos proper, plenty of nefarious things have gone on. For instance there was a report at the end of August from El Vigia about a cloned police truck operating in San Carlos. I am intimately familiar with that story since the cloned truck P-118 pictured below was parked two lots from my house for several days. It was kind of freaking us out to have so many armed cops just literally a stones through from my front and back door. The block were I live has only one entry and exit point and many of the neighbors who live on this block use two adjacent vacant lots on the street when we wish to avoid the endless u-turns off the main road. So one day at the end of last August I went to use that turn off and low and behold there is municipal police truck P-118 there with about 5 guys dressed in Marine Camo all with automatic weapons standing around the truck under a big mesquite tree. They kind of scowled at me for a moment since I was hoping that they might move the vehicle so I could get by. When I realized they weren’t going anywhere I had to make a u-turn and exit the street the normal way.

They stuck around our neighborhood for several days and then they just vanished. The info was all over the radio but there was almost nothing online or in print about it. What most likely happened is someone reported the vehicle to the comisario or other official. Then the records were checked and it was found out that the vehicle in question was actually in the shop for repairs and not out in the field. The cloned vehicle was confiscated by authorities but it seems no one else was.

And just in case anyone out there uses the small Alamos store in the ranchitos it has now been closed. At the moment and no one is sure when and or if it will every reopen. Is the store closure drug related? I can assure everyone that yes it is indeed related.

So lets keep our fingers crossed that San Carlos is getting better and the drug shoot outs and drive by killing’s will stay in Guaymas and Empalme, far away from sleepy San Carlos.