Cotija Mayor Assassinated on Election Night the Latest Casualty amid Growing Cartel Dominance in Mexico

Cotija Mayor Yolanda Sánchez

Monday night, Cotija Mayor Yolanda Sánchez left a gym on a public street, and walked alongside her bodyguard when men armed with assault rifles suddenly shot at them from a moving car.

The pair were seriously injured and transported to a nearby hospital where doctors learned the local town leader had been shot 19 times. She was pronounced dead by 9:30 p.m. local time, according to the EFE Spanish news agency.

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Private Americans Patrol the Smuggler-Blighted Border Badlands of Arizona

As blazing sunlight ebbs to a star-studded sky along the U.S.-Mexico border, members of the Arizona Border Recon group peer through field glasses at a trio of men on the southern side in camouflage fatigues and carrying pistols and AK-47s.

The men, almost certainly members of Sinaloa cartel factions, are using their own binoculars to scan random gaps in a roughly 30-foot-high wall of thick metal bars that stretches for miles along a flatland carved by arroyos and dotted with rocks, saguaro cactus and high grasses. At times, a solo gunshot echoes on the Mexican side, a sound the AZBR knows from experience is a signal to people to start moving north.

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