11 killed at Mexico bar after ejected patron sets bar ablaze, officials say

Eleven people were killed early Saturday after a man who had been kicked out of a bar a block from the U.S.-Mexico border set fire to the establishment, prosecutors said.

The blaze, which also injured six people, erupted around 1:30 a.m. Saturday at Beer House, in the Mexican town of San Luis Río Colorado, according to prosecutors in Sonora state. The bar appears to be located about 250 feet from San Luis, Ariz.

The seven men and four women killed were local residents, and several belonged to a musical group playing in the bar at the time, Gustavo Rómulo Salas Chávez, the state attorney general, told reporters Sunday. All the victims were adults, except for a 17-year-old.

Those injured were being treated at hospitals on both sides of the border.

Security cameras show the man arrived at the bar shortly after midnight Saturday and stayed until about 1:20 a.m., when security guards removed him from the premises for behaving disrespectfully to women, Salas Chávez said. Then, the man allegedly backed his pickup truck to the front of the bar, parked it and walked toward the back of the truck. He took out gasoline and threw it at the door of the bar, Salas Chávez said.

“He then used some instrument, perhaps a blowtorch, he used it as an igniting agent,” Salas Chávez said. “That’s when the fire began.”

Police said they arrested a suspect Saturday, but they did not identify him. Salas Chávez said the incident did not appear to be related to extortion — a common crime along the U.S.-Mexican border, in which crime gangs force business owners to make payments or risk being killed or having their shops set on fire.

Images shared online by local authorities showed Beer House engulfed in flames as firefighters sought to control the blaze. Photos taken the next morning show the charred remains of the business’s cordoned-off premises, its sign barely legible, and the U.S.-Mexico border wall visible just behind it.

“I join in the grief and deep sorrow that the families and friends of the 11 victims of the fire are going through,” Santos González Yescas, mayor of San Luis Río Colorado, said in a tweet. The governor of Sonora state, Alfonzo Durazo, thanked security forces for their efficiency in finding the person accused of being responsible.

Dozens of other people have been killed in suspected arson attacks on entertainment establishments in Mexico. In 2019, at least 27 people were killed in the Mexican state of Veracruz when assailants allegedly locked the doors of a nightclub and set the building on fire. In August 2011, 52 people died in an arson attack on a casino in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey — an incident police linked to the fearsome Zetas drug-smuggling gang.