At least nine people died after a gang of men opened fire in a bar in Guanajuato, one of Mexico’s deadliest states. Four women are among the nine people who lost their lives.

It is the third time in three months that gangs have opened fire in a bar and killed several people in the city. Authorities believe the attacks stem from an ongoing territorial war between a local gang and the Jalisco cartel. In all three attacks, the assailants tried to murder everyone in the bars, including customers and servers.

In the Wednesday night attack in Apaseo el Alto, the assailants made sure to let people know who was responsible for the attack. They left several handwritten posters on the bar floor covered in blood, and the messages on the poster were written and signed by a local gang called the Santa Rosa de Lima.

The leader of the gang, who is in prison, is nicknamed the ‘Marro,’ which means sledgehammer. Messages on the posters accused the bar owner of supporting the Jalisco cartel.

Gruesome photos from the scene showed several bodies of the bar’s servers slumped over in pools of blood.

Apaseo el Alto’s municipal government said that the shooters wounded two more women during the attack, but locals took them to the hospital and they are in stable condition.

Last month, on October 15, 12 people were murdered in a bar in the city of Irapuato, also located in Guanajuato. The attack involved several shooters who burst into a local bar and opened fire, killing six men and six women on the spot.

A few weeks before the attack in Irapuato, on September 21, unidentified shooters went into a bar in the city of Tarimoro, also in Guanajuato, opened fire, and murdered ten people. All the victims were male. Nine died on the spot, while another died at the hospital.

David Saucedo, a security analyst in the crime-ridden area, stated that the gangs targeted specific bars in the state, which are complicit with a rival gang. The owners might have refused to pay the attacking gang protection money, or they might be in business with rival gangs.

According to Saucedo, drug dealers, cartel members, or even lookouts who were enjoying a drink in the bar might have been the targets of the attacks, but the attackers killed innocent bystanders and escalated the murders into massacres.

Guanajuato has become the deadliest state in Mexico, having recorded the most murders out of all the Mexican states this year. The Mexican federal security ministry announced that Guanajuato had recorded 2,115 murders in just eight months between January and August.

It has become increasingly clear that the war in Guanajuato is a battle for control between two powerful drug cartels, as the Sinaloa cartel appears to back the Santa Rosa de Lima in its fight against the Jalisco cartel.

Although Mexico’s president, Manuel Obrador, vowed to reduce gang violence in the country when he took office in 2018, it seems his government is struggling to control the cartels and the subsequent bloodshed.