14ymedio, Mexico City, 26 September 2024 — “If they die, you die.” This was the threat a group of hitmen made to several Mexican doctors at a hospital of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), located in Villa Unión, Sinaloa. The doctors were forced on September 15 to treat drug traffickers with gunshot wounds after a confrontation.
The wave of violence that has plunged the state into a security crisis for more than 20 days, with 79 deaths, kidnappings and clashes, led the Cuban Embassy in Mexico to order the withdrawal of Cuban specialists who were in the town of Concordia, in the municipality of El Palmito.
Sinaloa Senator Paloma Sánchez Ramos, of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), denounced on Monday that after 15 days of fighting, the state has recorded 79 murders, 70 missing persons, the theft of 98 vehicles and losses of more than 5 billion pesos (almost 250 million dollars).
“They are not used to stress like this. The Cuban Embassy asked us to protect them and we had to do it that way,” said state Health Secretary Cuitláhuac González Galindo on Wednesday, in an interview with Espejo magazine.
The Cubans are part of a group of 32 specialists – 16 general practitioners and 16 surgeons, anesthesiologists and pediatricians – who had been sent to rural communities in El Valle del Carrizo, Choix, El Fuerte, Badiraguato, and Conco