The video footage is disturbing. A gunman stands atop the imposing Pyramid of the Moon, one of Mexico’s most iconic ancient structures, and opens fire on the tourists around him. Visitors cower for cover among the pre-Hispanic stone buildings. Screams fill the air.
When the ordeal ended, a 32-year-old Canadian woman was dead. The gunman was also dead — from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Tourists from Russia, Colombia, and Brazil were treated for injuries in local hospitals. A typical morning at one of Mexico’s foremost tourist destinations had descended into terrifying gun violence.
The authorities in Mexico are still piecing together how it happened. But one thing is already clear: this was not the cartels.
A Different Kind of Violence
The shooting came less than two months after masked gunmen from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel unleashed a wave of violence following the killing of their leader, “El Mencho,” by security forces. That was cartel violence — organized, territorial, and predictable in its brutality.
This incident was very different.
Mexican authorities say the Teotihuacán gunman acted alone. There was no apparent link to Mexico’s widespread cartel violence. The attacker has been identified as 27-year-old Julio César Jasso Ramírez, a Mexican citizen who lived in Mexico City. “The aggressor planned and carried out the attack on his own, and there is absolutely no indication at this point that he had any external help or that any other individuals were involved,” said the Attorney-General of Mexico State, José Luis Cervantes Martínez.
Among the gunman’s belongings, officials found a handgun, a bag of cartridges, and a tactical knife. But they also found something else: “literature, images, manuscripts apparently related to acts of violence which are known may have occurred in the United States in April 1999.”
A witness told Reuters that visitors had heard the attacker refer to Columbine — the site of the notorious US school shooting on April 20, 1999, in which two teenagers killed 13 people. The Teotihuacán attack occurred exactly 27 years later.
A Psychopathic Profile
Attorney-General Cervantes said the evidence collected so far pointed to “a psychopathic profile of the attacker, characterized by a tendency to imitate situations that occurred in other places, at other times, and involving other individuals — this tendency can be referred to as copycat behavior.”
That diagnosis is chilling. Mexico is no stranger to violence. Some of the most atrocious massacres of this century in the Americas have been carried out on Mexican soil. But those have generally been between rival drug cartels fighting for territorial control. The Teotihuacán shooting falls into a very different category: mass killings carried out by lone assailants without links to established criminal organizations.
The incident at the ancient site comes just three weeks after a teenager killed two teachers with an AR-15 assault rifle at his school in the western state of Michoacán. That was another profoundly unusual incident in Mexican society.
Valeria Villa, a Mexican family therapist with decades of experience in mental health issues in the country, described it as “a moment of transition, a very unfortunate, lamentable and worrying one, towards imitation of the phenomenon of mass killings we see every day in the United States.”
The World Cup Cloud
The fact that visitors from overseas were targeted poses a headache for the government just weeks before Mexico co-hosts the men’s football World Cup. The tournament gets underway in Mexico City on June 11. The shooting at a popular tourist site, coming so soon after the cartel violence, has caused real concern among football fans planning to visit.
President Claudia Sheinbaum was quick to offer her sympathies and “solidarity” with the victims and their families. The Sheinbaum administration is trying hard to reassure visitors that they will be safe and will take home only fond memories of Mexico, its people, its food, and its culture.
But the footage of a gunman on the Pyramid of the Moon firing at foreigners will not ease any fears — especially so close to kickoff.
The Broader Problem
Sheinbaum recently hailed the success of her federal security strategy, saying the daily homicide rate in February 2026 was 44 percent lower than at the end of her predecessor’s term in September 2024. She has also repeatedly argued that the country’s murder rate had been stabilized by the last administration and that it has been on a downward trend under her mandate.
Her critics argue that the murder numbers do not tell the entire story. With tens of thousands of Mexicans unaccounted for, disappearances among young people remain a major problem.
The Teotihuacán shooting is not a cartel problem. It is not a disappearance problem. It is something new. Mexico has long experienced the constant mood music of drug-related cartel violence, which Dr. Villa believes has desensitized society and young people. While guns are not as available over the counter or online with the same ease as in the United States, weapons can be readily obtained on the black market. Most of those guns have been smuggled into the country from the United States.
Now, Mexico appears to be confronting a new threat: the lone gunman, inspired by foreign massacres, acting without organization or ideology.
The Bottom Line
A gunman opened fire from atop the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacán on Monday, killing a 32-year-old Canadian woman and injuring tourists from Russia, Colombia, and Brazil before killing himself. Mexican authorities say the attacker, 27-year-old Julio César Jasso Ramírez, acted alone with no links to cartels. Among his belongings, officials found references to the 1999 Columbine school shooting, which occurred exactly 27 years earlier. The attorney-general described the attacker’s profile as “psychopathic” and driven by “copycat behavior.”
The shooting comes just weeks before Mexico co-hosts the FIFA World Cup and follows a separate school shooting in Michoacán. President Sheinbaum has offered sympathy but faces growing concerns about tourist safety. The footage of a gunman on an ancient pyramid firing at foreigners is now seared into the public imagination. And Mexico is confronting a kind of violence it has not had to face before: copycats.
