Mexico arrests two people for shooting at Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun hotel

Mexican authorities arrested two people allegedly involved in a shooting that broke out last Thursday on a beach near Cancun, the main tourist destination in the Caribbean. Mexican, and that left two dead.

The prosecutor’s office of the state of Quintana Roo, in the east of the country, said that it managed to locate three of the four vehicles in which the attackers arrived on the beach that day, for which they arrested two people who were driving them while one more managed to escape .

“Two drivers were captured while a third fled and there was even an exchange of shots against police elements, managing to escape into a jungle area.“The agency said in a statement.

The agency also said that according to the first investigations, the groups that faced gunshots that day on a beach in Puerto Morelos, a neighbor of Cancun, “They are a spinoff of the Sinaloa cartel“, Who “Spaces are being disputed for the sale of drugs.”

The shooting on November 4 took place in the hotel’s beach area Hyatt Riviera, which is part of the luxurious tourist complexes of the Mexican Caribbean.

The local authorities announced that same day that the armed confrontation had been between two antagonistic groups of drug dealers.

On October 20, another shooting between alleged drug dealers cost the lives of two tourists, a German and an Indian, in Tulum, a resort in the south of Cancún and neighbor of the Riviera maya.

Violence linked to crime, especially the retail sale of drugs, has hit the Mexican Caribbean for years.

Most violent incidents occur far from exclusive hotels, but in recent years there have been armed clashes in tourist areas.

In January 2017, three foreigners and two Mexicans died during a shooting at an electronic music festival in neighboring Playa del Carmen.

These incidents have led European countries and the United States to issue alerts to their citizens about the risks of visiting the Mexican Caribbean, among the main beach destinations worldwide.

Tourism represents 8.5% of Mexico’s GDP and is the main economic activity in the southeastern region of the country.

Since December 2006, when the federal government launched a controversial military anti-drug operation, more than 300,000 violent deaths have been recorded in Mexico, according to authorities, who attribute most of the murders to organized crime.