(Mexico City) Four people were killed Monday in Cancun, the tourist capital of Mexico’s Caribbean coast, in a shooting apparently linked to a drug-related settling of scores, local authorities said Monday.
The shooting broke out in the hotel zone on Monday, the first days of the two-week Easter holiday, during which Cancun and its region are preparing to receive more than a million tourists.
After the bodies of four men were found, two suspects were arrested, local government security coordinator José de la Peña said in a video.
The victims are “apparently linked to petty drug trafficking activities”, and are neither tourists nor seasonal workers, it was specified.
Petty traffickers compete in Cancun for the market selling drugs to tourists and extorting businesses.
The millions of tourists who arrive by direct flights from Mexico, Europe and the United States are very generally spared.
In October 2021, two young tourists, a German and an Indian, had however been the collateral victims of an armed settling of scores between traffickers in a restaurant in Tulum, another fashionable seaside resort on the Caribbean coast.
In January 2017, three foreigners and two Mexicans died in a shooting during an electronic music festival in Playa del Carmen, between Cancun and Tulum.