00,000 security forces largely to Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara. But violence shadowed the tournament when five Mexican police officers were shot dead and five others wounded in Michoacan state on the eve of the World Cup opener in Mexico City.

Still, the leg of the competition in Mexico, which wrapped up on Sunday, ended without major security incidents.

While soccer fans packed the streets of key cities in celebration of the sport and memes of ducks donning Mexico jerseys flooded social media, violence in many parts of the country only continued.

Mexican security analyst David Saucedo says the attacks like the ones in Guajes de Ayala and other areas haunted by cartel violence are the fallout of the government's World Cup security strategy.

 There was heavy security in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey. Lots of military and National Guard officers from other states were transferred to fortify World Cup hosts,  Saucedo said.  But in doing that, they also left a number of regions that weren't host cities unprotected. 

In northern Sinaloa, weekend clashes between criminal groups left a naval officer and 10 suspected gang members dead. The week before, in southern Veracruz, the local government said it found the body of a kidnapped journalist, who it says was killed by criminal groups.

On Wednesday in the southern state of Chiapas, which has been eclipsed by violent cartel power struggles in recent years, eight bodies were found in a pile with cartel messages.

Warnings of impending attack went unheeded

The Guajes de Ayala community had warned law enforcement that the cartel was closing in on their town and also shared videos of cartel drones hovering overhead and the location of cartel fighters inching closer to their homes on social media.

They said they feared an impending attack. Solario said no one helped.

On Wednesday morning that came to a head. While Solario and her group sought refuge from the firefight in the abandoned clinic, others elsewhere sheltered in churches.

Members of a local self-defense group formed by residents in response to cartel violence patrol in Guajes de Ayala, Mexico, Tuesday, March 10, 2026. Marco Ugarte / AP

Local and federal authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but after the AP inquired about the attacks, Mexico's Security Cabinet posted on X that  events described in news articles have been ruled out  by authorities.

The post added that state security forces  are heading to the area to verify the situation, strengthen institutional presence, and provide security to the population. 

Authorities had previously denied accusations that they've abandoned the Guerrero communities but when the AP recently visited the region, there was no state presence anywhere near the communities.

For years, the La Nueva Familia Michoacana - which was declared a foreign terrorist organization last year by the Trump administration, along with other Mexican cartels and Central and South American gangs - has been pushing into Guerrero.

Last year, the U.S. indicted the top two leaders of La Nueva Familia Michoacana and offered up to $8 million rewards for information leading to their capture and conviction. In 2024, the U.S. sanctioned against eight figures affiliated with the cartel, including an alleged assassin known as  The Doctor. 

In response to attacks and what the community said was an absence by security authorities, hundreds have fled their homes. In recent years, men in the community have formed a vigilante group to fight back.

The vigilante group was armed by rival cartels, fighting for territory with La Nueva Familia Michoacana, and carried military-grade weapons smuggled from the U.S., grenades and drones, which they used to monitor the encroaching cartel.

For a place like Guerrero, marked by decades of warring criminal factions, the locals have long said it wasn't a question of if they would face another attack, but when.