Aunt and cousin of Mexico’s education secretary “brutally murdered” in their home, he says

Authorities in the western Mexican state of Colima said they killed three people suspected in the shooting deaths of two family members of Mexico’s secretary of education on Saturday.

Colima, located on Mexico’s Pacific coast, is one of the country’s most violent states. It recorded the highest homicide rate in Mexico in 2023 and 2024, according to the US State Department.

The local prosecutor’s office said officers killed three suspects in the 4:30 am (1030 GMT) shooting of two women, whom Mexico’s Secretary of Public Education Mario Delgado later identified as his aunt and cousin.

They did not identify a motive in the shooting or say whether they were searching for other suspects.

“Deep shock, outrage, and sorrow over the events that occurred this morning in Colima, where my aunt Eugenia Delgado and my cousin Sheila were brutally murdered in their home,” Delgado wrote on X on Saturday.

“Throughout my entire childhood, my aunt Queña —as we affectionately called her— made my birthday cake every year. That was how she earned her living, working hard, selling delicious cakes and traditional Colima food prepared like only she knew how. She is now with my grandparents and with my father, her beloved brother,” he wrote on X.

Officials tracked the suspects’ vehicle to a Colima home on Saturday afternoon and killed three people in a gunfight, according to the prosecutor’s office.

Investigators found weapons and clothing in the suspects’ home linked to the double shooting.

Delgado was appointed education secretary by President Claudia Sheinbaum in 2024 and his profile photo on X shows both of them together.  He previously served as national president of the ruling Morena party.

Last month, Sheinbaum said that efforts to crack down on Mexican cartels and slow migration north were showing “compelling results” in an effort to head off intervention talk by the Trump administration.

Her comments came after President Trump threatened action against Mexican drug cartels by U.S. forces last week. Mr. Trump told Fox News that the United States had “knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water” and that the U.S. was “going to start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels.”