The Attorney General's Office of the State of Michoacán maintains that the homicide of former Uruapan mayor Carlos Alberto Manzo Rodríguez had no political motive and attributes it to retaliation by the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG). As of October 31, 2026, the institution reports 34 people detained and 90% progress in building its investigation, according to El Universal.
Manzo was shot dead on the night of Saturday, November 1, 2025, during the Festival de Velas in Uruapan; the material perpetrator, a minor, was killed by his security detail. The head of the Prosecutor's Office, Israel Vega Rodríguez, explained that the lines of investigation exhausted so far point to the mayor's actions against criminal groups in the region, including the arrest of an operator nicknamed El Rhino. Infobae reported on October 28 that the prosecutor's office then counted 33 detainees, among them the alleged mastermind, and that Governor Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla described an infiltration of the former mayor's inner circle. The case matters to Mexico because it gauges institutional capacity to clarify a high-profile homicide at the municipal level.
Among those detained are Ramón Ángel Álvarez Ayala, El R1, identified as the CJNG regional leader and alleged mastermind, captured on July 30 in Atotonilco el Alto, Jalisco, and Jorge Armando N, El Licenciado or El Contador, accused of planning the homicide, detained on November 19, 2025, in Morelia and transferred to Cefereso 1. The prosecutor's office counts 3,500 investigative acts, 1,200 hours of video analyzed and 3,000 expert proceedings. At least 29 of the detainees have already been bound over to trial. Two procedural steps remain: the arrest of former military officer José Manuel Jiménez Miranda, Manzo's former head of security, with a reward of 100,000 pesos, and the handover of the former mayor's phones, which are held by the current municipal president, Grecia Quiroz García.
With those two steps pending, the state prosecutor's office describes a case in its final stage of integration in the common jurisdiction. The next data point to watch is the execution of the arrest warrant against the former head of security and the evidentiary use of the phone equipment.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.