Villahermosa is Burning: Bullets and Fear Shattered the Peace in Tabasco

When I arrive in Villahermosa, that city in Tabasco that at one time of the year burns at over 40 degrees, I perceive it as serene, almost sleepy, with a suddenly unsettling tranquility. But, in spite of the warnings in the news and the alarmed voices of some friends, I walk through it with a sense of security.

It’s a small city, with fewer than a million inhabitants. Barely 972,000 souls breathe in its streets. By car, any point can be just 15 minutes away, even the airport. That proximity gave it an almost big-town feel, where everything is within reach and nothing seems too far away, not even the violence, until it arrives.

I’ve walked through cities where violence permeates the air like the scent of an impending storm. But here, until the end of 2023, there was nothing that set off my alarm bells, no sign that touched my tolerance limits. Everything changed on December 22, when a shooting erupted in the stillness of the Club Campestre, one of Villahermosa’s most exclusive enclaves, home to businesspeople and public officials.

That night, the explosions burst the bubble. There was talk of a car chase that ended in a confrontation with private security. But the official version was just another lie. From then on, something broke. Or perhaps, simply, something was revealed: that Villahermosa was already under siege, that crime wasn’t a distant rumor, but an entrenched presence in the halls of power.

Then came the riots in two prisons. Sixteen vehicles burned in different parts of the city. Fear walked barefoot through the avenues, leaving trails of ash. And as if that combustion weren’t enough, at the end of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s six-year term, almost a year later, Villahermosa burned again—this time literally and heartbreakingly—when an armed group stormed the DBar nightclub: six dead and ten injured.

Multiple violent incidents left three dead and multiple injured in the southern state.

The city then stopped feigning calm. The anguish of its population began to be felt. Both events became symbols: one at the top of the hill, in the elite neighborhood; the other on a popular night, surrounded by music and alcohol. Two extreme points that frame the same fear.

Tragedies have faces. Villahermosa has burned again.

I travel through Villahermosa from north to south, from east to west. It’s seven o’clock at night on any given day in January, February, March, April, or May, and the streets, avenues, and shopping malls are empty. No one ordered it, but people have imposed their own curfew. They keep each other safe with messages in chat groups: “Don’t go there,” “Someone just got killed,” “There’s a blockade.” Each warning is another line on the map of fear.

The traces appear on the streets: areas cordoned off due to crimes, National Guard convoys, Army patrols with armored vehicles. Stories that repeat themselves: a gunshot to the head; an attack on a motorcycle; a viral video showing a young man bleeding to death in the middle of a shopping mall.

Villahermosa is small. Tragedies have faces and voices: a woman told me she would attend the funeral mass for a friend, one of those killed in the DBar. Another told me that her nephew was shot in both legs during the same attack. These aren’t distant anecdotes. They are open wounds.

And I’ve witnessed fires: two Oxxo convenience stores engulfed in flames, a truck burning while a man was emptying a bucket of gasoline. I thought about getting out to help, thinking it was an accident. But no. It was arson. Then I saw a man being pulled from his car on a bridge. They were going to set it on fire. We all reversed at the same time, as if backing away would distance us from the horror.

For days, I listened. The voices of the people are more eloquent than any press release:

“Wow! They’re shooting.”

“Wow! They’ve already killed another one.”

“Wow! They’re burning cars.”

“Oh my God, Villahermosa is burning,” I thought.

The city has burned again. And fear, too, has statistics. Between January and May 2024, the death toll reached 246. An average of 1.64 executions per day. One death per day. In the National Urban Public Security Survey, corresponding to the fourth quarter of 2024, 95.3% of the Tabasco population reported feeling unsafe. Villahermosa even surpassed Uruapan, Michoacán, and Culiacán, Sinaloa. And so far in 2025, the situation hasn’t been much different.

The two incidents—at the Club Campestre and the DBar—weren’t accidents. They were the eruption of a deeper truth. Hernán Bermúdez Requena, former Secretary of Public Security under then-governor Adán Augusto López, lived at the Club Campestre (and I say lived, because he is now a fugitive). Today, he is identified as the head of the criminal organization known as La Barredora, which is blamed for this wave of insecurity.

Shooting between La Barredora commanders and CJNG

December 22, 2024, wasn’t a dispute between private individuals, as reported on the radio. It was an internal war. A neighbor told me that the shooting wasn’t between strangers, but between members of the same group: La Barredora commanders fighting with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The fight for power was just beginning. Two people were killed, both police officers. Their bodies were hidden and found months later, on the border of Tabasco and Chiapas.

I remembered that in 2006, when the Familia Michoacana criminal group was gradually taking over towns in Michoacán, a municipal president told me that the criminals offered him complete political power in exchange for total control over their police force. It made perfect sense because if you control the police, you control the uniforms, you control the weapons, and you control impunity.

The same thing has happened in Tabasco. The same in Bajío, in Tamaulipas, in Coahuila. In Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, even the police themselves were finishing off the cartel’s enemies. The uniform has become camouflage. Another layer of cover for crime. Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, was photographed in military uniform. And who doesn’t remember the shield of Arturo’s Special Forces, worn on their uniforms by members of El Botas’s protection cell, Arturo Beltrán Leyva?

In Villahermosa, the former Secretary of Public Security, in his police uniform and all, was identified as the leader of La Barredora. Hence the chaos. Because the government refused to cede power, and the rival cartel wasn’t willing to wait. That’s why the violence reached not only Saloya, Gaviotas, or Indeco—in the outlying areas of the Tabasco capital—but also the heart of the city, the Campestre neighborhood.

The war continues. It will leave more dead. But even with all this, Villahermosa, in my memory, retains something of its peaceful soul. It’s still not like other regions where life and death are decided in seconds and in broad daylight. A few weeks ago, in Bosques de Saloya, I spoke with a woman who explained to me what the reports never say:

“Last night they descended upon them here, where this point is. Don’t think the victims were criminals either. They’re just regular families. The criminals live off of them. They don’t even have weapons to defend themselves. They’re not like the others, the ones who arrived. They have everything at their disposal to do their bidding.”

A government worker summed up for me what many people think:

“Here in my Villahermosa, people are brawly, yes, but they don’t resort to using guns. At most they might come to blows. But these are individuals who are no more than an MC1—a one-meter-high red mangrove—that’s true.

Villahermosa is burning, yes. But it hasn’t entirely lost its habit of resisting in silence. And in that resistance, there are still those who believe that peace can be rekindled. Not like fire, but like light.

Source: Milenio