Gunmen from the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas carried out a large-scale attack on a rival group of gunmen near a small rural community in the Mexican border state of Nuevo Leon. The fighting went on for over an hour, involving several armored vehicles, high-powered weapons, and explosives. By the time authorities responded, the gunmen had fled, taking at least five bodies of fallen gunmen but leaving several burned-out armored trucks.
The fighting took place earlier this week near the town of Los Rayones in the border state of Nuevo Leon, where a group of gunmen from the CDN-Los Zetas rolled into the region, which is northwest of the Monterrey Metropolitan area. The gunmen clashed with a group of rivals. The CDN-Los Zetas is one of the six Mexican drug cartels that have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. Department of State.
Credit: Breitbart News Foundation / Cartel Chronicles
It remains unclear how many gunmen took part in the intense clash, but the two groups fought for over an hour and then left the area. Since Los Rayones does not have a local police force, the state attorney general’s office mobilized dozens of officers from other parts of the state to rush in.
It took Nuevo Leon state police forces several hours to arrive at the location as they had to send officers from several surrounding areas. Mexican military and federal forces also joined in eventually. By the time authorities arrived, they found six vehicles that the gunmen had left behind, some of them had various bullet impacts, while others had been burned out. Police reports point to numerous blood stains on the floor and thousands of bullet casings on the ground, highlighting the intensity of the fighting.
Credit: Breitbart News Foundation / Cartel Chronicles
Law enforcement sources revealed to Breitbart News Foundation that the fierce shootout is tied to an expansion effort by the CDN-Los Zetas currently led by Juan “Juanito” Cisneros Trevino, a nephew of the cartel’s prior supreme leaders Miguel Angel (Z-40) and Omar Trevino (Z-42) Morales who are currently in US custody awaiting trial. The current leader has been methodical in his expansion efforts by slowly pushing out his forces and setting up a series of refuel and reload stations and stash houses that allow him to expand his territories with a support structure, which other cartels have not been doing. Authorities revealed that Juanito is just as bloodthirsty as prior leaders of the CDN-Los Zetas, and his cartel has been behind a large portion of the violent crimes in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, and Coahuila.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart News Foundation traveled to Mexico City and the states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas, including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart News Foundation’s Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and their original Spanish. This article was written by “J.M. Martinez” from Coahuila.
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