Brazen strikes by organised crime leaders have left bystanders killed as many question the president’s security policies

For Carlos Holguín it was supposed to be just another day of toil.After leaving the factory where he works morning shifts in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, the 24-year-old began his nightly routine last Thursday as a food app delivery driver.Holguín was collecting a pizza when something hot pierced his left foot. Seconds later he saw people running for their lives. Still unsure what was happening, the delivery driver – who has a hearing impairment – threw himself to the ground as two more bullets struck his legs.

“When my mother got to the pizzeria he was lying there … groaning, covered in blood, and had been shot three times,” said his brother, César Holguín, 27.

“Unfortunately, we live in a city and a country under assault from organised crime,” Holguín said – as Mexico came to terms with the latest explosion of bloodshed in its traumatic modern history.

The shooting in Ciudad Juárez came during a headline-grabbing week of violence that paralysed some of Mexico’s most important cities, left more than a dozen people dead and raised fresh questions over the security policies of Mexico’s nationalist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The mayhem began on 9 August, when security forces reportedly tried to arrest a senior leader from the country’s most notorious organised crime group, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The response from Jalisco hatchet men was fast and furious: in a series of brazen strikes they torched buses, cars and dozens of convenience stores as they rampaged across central cities such as Guadalajara, Guanajuato and León.

Forty-eight hours later the violence spread north as rival gangsters clashed in a prison in Ciudad Juárez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas.

The violence, seemingly unrelated to the havoc in Jalisco and Guanajuato, soon spilled beyond the prison’s walls as cartel gunmen hit a series of civilian targets, including the Little Caesar’s pizzeria where Holguín was picking up an order.

“Terror,” one Mexican journalist tweeted alongside graphic security footage of the moment police entered the bullet-riddled restaurant to find the floor smeared with blood.

The next day, Tijuana, roughly 20 miles (32km) over the border from San Diego, found itself at the eye of the storm, with its usually bustling streets emptying as bandits erected roadblocks and burned dozens of vehicles.

“They are literally torching our the country,” tweeted the newspaper editor Adrián López, who said the direct targeting of civilians was unprecedented.

López Obrador, who was elected in 2018 promising to “pacify” his troubled nation with a controversial policy of “hugs, not bullets”, claimed the attacks suggested those efforts were succeeding. He called the violence desperate cartel “propaganda” designed to project a false sense of power.