The morning of Monday, May 20, it will be recorded as one of the most dramatic since the beginning of the mandate of the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum. As soon as his traditional morning conference began when the Secretary of Public Security, Omar García Harfuch broke the usual protocol.
With a tense face, he showed him something urgent on his cell phone. After a few minutes of tension and murmurs among officials, Sheinbaum stopped the press conference to confirm devastating news: the right hand of the head of government of Mexico City, Clara Brugadaand one of his closest advisors, had been executed in broad daylight on a busy avenue in the capital.
Ximena GuzmánPrivate Secretary of Brugada, and José Muñoz, political advisor of his intimate circle, were killed while boarding a van on the Tlalpan road. A motorcycle hitman shot them without a word and fled in seconds. There was no robbery, no struggle, or possible confusion: it was a direct, premeditated execution, in the urban heart of the country.
The scene, filmed by security cameras and observed by multiple witnesses, immediately hit all levels of Mexican power. The attack was more than a crime: it was a message to the State.
Responsible
Both victims had strategic roles. Guzmán handled the agenda and had transverse influence on the city government, while Muñoz, with years of work with Brugada, was a key piece of his boss’s political assembly. His death not only represents an emotional and operational loss for the mayor, but constitutes a direct challenge to its management and, by extension, to the political structure that Sheinbaum leads nationwide.
The Federal Government reacted quickly: Harfuch left the conference enclosure, emergency and military protocols were activated to the place of the attack. The Secretariat of Defense already investigates crime as a possible attack linked to drug trafficking. Three hypotheses dominate investigations at this time. The first points to a criminal group that operates in the historic center of Mexico City, related to ambulance, human trafficking and drug trafficking. This group had already been linked to an anterior attack against the leader Diana Sánchez Barrios in 2023.
The second line suggests a possible attack by the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, an organization that already tried to murder Harfuch in 2020 and has suffered in recent weeks key arrests in the capital. The third hypothesis involves the Tepito Union, a criminal network that has strengthened links with the Sinaloa Cartel, another organization pressured by the federal government and that recently lost important operations in Azcapotzalco and the city center.
Alerts
Although there are still no certainties, crime does not seem to respond to a common logic. The planning, the choice of the place, the precision of the attack and the identity of the victims indicate that it was not an isolated or improvised fact. Everything points to a symbolic action, aimed at expose government vulnerability and to challenge the capacity of control of the State in the capital of the country. If organized crime can kill with impunity to key figures of local power in guarded areas and under the eye of the C5, what prevents it from doing it at other levels or with other whites?
The closest antecedent is embodied by Harfuch himself, target of an attack with long weapons in 2020which survived with serious injuries. That episode revealed to what extent the cartels can act in strategic areas of Mexico City. The new attack only confirms that capacity, but with a crucial difference: now Sheinbaum is president, and Brugada is her confidence figure in the capital. Hitting there has an inevitable political reading: not only seeks to intimidate, it is also intended to demonstrate that formal power is being challenged by actors with resources, logistics and intelligence.
The crime also has an international projection. In the United States, Republican congressmen have claimed military operations in Mexican territory to combat cartels. An attack like this feeds that narrative and presses Mexico to show rapid results. The possibility of an American intervention, although still remote, gains traction with each high profile crime. That is why the Mexican army has taken immediate control of the case, not only for internal security reasons, but to prevent the emptiness of authority from being filled from abroad.
You may also interest you
By rn
