Eight people have been arrested in northern Mexico have over the killing of two 10-year-old boys and a woman in what appears to be ritual sacrifices. Prosecutors in Sonora, in the north-west of the country have accused the suspects of belonging to the La Santa Muerte (Holy Death) cult. The victims' blood has been poured round an altar to the idol, which is portrayed as a skeleton holding a scythe and clothed in flowing robes. The cult, which celebrates death, has been growing rapidly in Mexico in the last 20 years, and now has up to two million followers. Jose Larrinaga, spokesman for Sonora state prosecutors, said the most recent killing was earlier this month, while the other two were committed in 2009 and 2010. Their bodies were found at the altar site in the small mining community of Nacozari, 70 miles south of Douglas, Arizona. Investigations were launched after the family of 10-year-old Jesus Octavio Martinez Yanez reported him missing early this month.
Saturday, 31 March 2012
Eight people from 'Holy Death' cult arrested in Mexico over ritual sacrifices of woman and two 10-year-old boys
Gang dispute sparked funeral home shooting that left 2 dead, 12 injured
Dispute among gang members at a North Miami-area funeral home sparked a mass shooting that injured 12 people and killed two men, according to Miami-Dade police and law enforcement. The gunmen, who fired a barrage of bullets at a crowd of mourners Friday night, remained on the loose. Investigators have not released information about the shooters, only that a white car may have been involved. One of the victims, a 43-year-old man, died outside the Funeraria Latina Emanuel funeral home, authorities said. The other, a 27-year-old man, died at the hospital. Witnesses at the funeral home had said one of the two people killed was shot in the chest. Among the wounded was a 5-year-old girl who was shot in the leg. She is hospitalized at Jackson Memorial Hospital and is listed in stable condition. The funeral was for Morvin Andre, 21, of North Miami, who was buried Saturday morning at Southern Memorial Park next to the funeral home. Andre was killed March 16 after he tried to jump 22-and-a-half feet from the fourth floor of the Aventura Mall parking garage to escape pursuit from Bloomingdale’s loss prevention employees. Andre landed on his feet, but then fell back and hit his head, according Aventura Police Major Skip Washa, a spokesman. Washa said Saturday the county medical examiner’s office has ruled Andre’s death a suicide because the Bloomingdale’s employees were one floor below Andre when they told him to stop. Instead, he jumped. Originally, it was reported that Andre, a nursing student at Broward Community College, had been killed in a shooting, according to mourners at the funeral home. A law enforcement official told the Miami Herald that the shooting involved members of several South Florida gangs who were in attendance at his wake Friday night to pay their respects. Andre was not part of a gang himself, the official said. Certain gang members took offense when someone touched Andre’s body in the casket, setting off an argument that spilled out into the street. Members of one gang retrieved an assault rifle and a handgun from a car and opened fire at other gang members in front of the funeral home, a police commander told Miami Herald news partner WFOR-CBS 4. Shooting erupted as more than 100 people were gathered outside the funeral home, in the 14900 block of West Dixie Highway, outside the city limits of North Miami. “I was on my way out of the chapel when I heard the shots,“ said A.D. Lenoir, the pastor who officiated at the service. “I told people to look for cover. It was chaos.” Lenoir, 29, said people were screaming, crying and yelling. Several victims were taken to Jackson, and others to local hospitals. The West Dixie Highway corridor has been the scene of several shootings in recent years. In 2007, the owner of a martial arts studio was fatally gunned down in a drive-by.
Sunday, 25 March 2012
Drugs gang’s banners declare truce for Pope’s visit to Mexico
Banners purportedly signed by one of Mexico’s drug cartels have promised there will be no violence during next weekend’s visit by Pope Benedict XVI. At least 11 banners signed by the Knights Templar gang were found in five towns across Guanajuato state, including the city of Leon, where the Pope begins his trip on Friday, the state attorney general’s office said. A spokesman said the banners were found over the weekend hanging from pedestrian bridges and carried messages about “a sort of truce for peace and said they are going to keep the peace during the Pope’s visit”. The newspaper Reforma said one banner read: “The Knights Templar disavow any military action, we are not murderers, welcome to the Pope.” The Knights Templar gives itself a pseudo-religious persona, proclaiming in banners that it is the defender of the region’s people. It was created in Michoacan state after a split with the since-weakened La Familia cartel. In February, the Knights Templar put out banners warning rival gangs to stay away and not to create trouble during the Pope’s stay. The pontiff is scheduled to visit Guanajuato from Friday until Monday, when he will fly on to Cuba. Mexican president Felipe Calderon plans to greet the Pope at Leon’s airport. For many Catholics, the papal visit is long overdue, given that the country has more Catholics than any other Spanish-speaking country. Devotion still runs high for the Pope’s predecessor, John Paul II, who honoured Mexico by making it his first trip outside the Vatican and coming back four more times. He is known as “Mexico’s pope”. Recently, a glass case containing his blood – one of the relics of his beatification – travelled throughout Mexico for 91 days and is said to have been seen by 27 million people.
Saturday, 24 March 2012
Pimps Arrested in Spain for 'Barcoding' Women
In this photo released by the Spanish Police on Saturday March 24, 2012 a tattoo in the form of a bar code is seen on the wrist of a woman in this hand out photo. Spain´s Interior Ministry says police have arrested 22 persons of Romanian nationality on suspicion of using violence to force women into prostitution and tattooing them with bar codes as a sign of ownership. Officers freed one 19-year-old woman who had been beaten, held against her will and tattooed with a bar code and an amount of money which investigators believe was the debt the gang wished to extort before freeing her. The women were tattooed on their wrists, and the freed woman had the sum 2,000 euro ($ 2,650) etched onto her skin. (AP Photo/Spanish Police) (AP2012)
MADRID – Police in Spain arrested 22 alleged pimps who purportedly tattooed women with bar codes as a sign of ownership and used violence to force them into prostitution.
Police are calling the gang the "bar code pimps." Officers freed one 19-year-old woman who had been beaten, held against her will and tattooed with a bar code and an amount of money — €2,000 ($2,650) — which investigators believe was the debt the gang wished to extort before releasing her.
The woman had also been whipped, chained to a radiator and had her hair and eyebrows shaved off, according to an Interior Ministry statement.
Friday, 23 March 2012
Mexican police found seven dismembered bodies hidden in barrels and a sack inside a burnt-out SUV in the central city of Metepec
Mexican police found seven dismembered bodies hidden in barrels and a sack inside a burnt-out SUV in the central city of Metepec, officials said.
Mexico state Attorney General Alfredo Castillo Cervantes confirmed the grisly discovery Wednesday morning, although he said authorities have not identified the victims and did not provide more information.
He also did not confirm press reports that a message left alongside the bodies indicated they were members of a police force in that state.
“They haven’t been examined yet; we don’t have anyone unaccounted for in roll call. We’re going to await the examination and then we’ll know when these people disappeared, where they’re from and we’ll have more information,” Castillo said at a press conference.
All of the police forces conduct thorough roll calls to check if anyone is absent, he said.
The state attorney general refused to confirm if a threatening note was left at the crime scene and said divulging messages left by criminal gangs serves no useful purpose and only benefits those groups.
Finally, he said the state’s police forces were conducting several operations to track down the perpetrators of the massacre.
Mexico’s drug war death toll stood at 47,515 from December 2006 to Sept. 30.
The murder total has grown every year of President Felipe Calderon’s military offensive against the well-funded, heavily armed drug cartels.
Unofficial tallies published in December by independent daily La Jornada put the death toll from Mexico’s drug war at more than 50,000.
Which cartel will prevail? The Sinaloa cartel and the upstart Los Zetas are locked in a vicious fight to be the top dog.
I discussed this with a good friend of mine, Mexican journalist Jose Carreño, over dinner the other day in Mexico City. He said: “The most remarkable thing about Los Zetas is how quickly they have grown and expanded since they broke with the Gulf Cartel and they have done so by sheer barbaric violence but what allowed them to expand so quickly is what will result in their downfall. The Sinaloa Federation is confrontational too but it is willing to form alliances and to compromise and to deal. Los Zetas isn’t and no one can afford to tolerate their survival – not the Mexican establishment, not the U.S. government and not rival cartels.” That is kind of my conclusion in this analysis of the strength and weaknesses, structure and methods of the two cartels published today in Agora. For those of you who don’t read Spanish this is a rough, truncated version: Mexico’s two most powerful cartels – Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán’s Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas – appear deadlocked in their efforts to gain the upper hand but in the longer term the Sinaloans are likely to remain Mexico’s largest crime organization and emerge as the clear top dog. The struggle for mastery has left hundreds of foot-soldiers dead and comes at a time that Mexican authorities are redoubling their efforts to hunt down the cartel leaders but, barring a devastating blow against the Sinaloa Federation or an internecine blow-up, experts say the Sinaloans are better established, more rooted and better organized. “The Sinaloa cartel is more entrenched in society and Los Zetas are barely starting to build a social base founded on intimidation and corruption,” says Alberto Islas Torres, the founder of Risk Evaluation, a risk management company, and a former adviser in the presidential administration of Ernesto Zedilllo. José Luis Valdés-Ugalde , a political scientist at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, agrees that in the longer term the Sinaloans will prevail. “Both organizations are very strong and cross national borders. Los Zetas have shown tremendous ability in a short period of time and great strength to break away from the Gulf cartel. But the Sinaloa cartel has a dominant position and over time that will increase,” he says. The competition between the two crime organizations that’s triggered massacres and assassinations is dominating the criminal landscape in Mexico. Other cartels and crime gangs are being squeezed by Los Zetas and the Sinaloans and forced to align themselves with one or other. In recent months, Mexican authorities have pulled off some significant operations against both cartels with a series of arrests and fatal shootings of top lieutenants, including the Sinaloa Federation’s Cabrera Sarabia brothers and Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, the alleged leader of the Gente Nueva gang, a Sinaloan enforcement group. And Sinaloan production of methamphetamine has been disrupted by several significant seizures of precursor chemicals in west coast ports. Political scientist José Luis Valdés-Ugalde believes the government’s offensive against the cartels has fallen more heavily on Los Zetas than the Sinaloa Federation. “Federal operations against los Zetas in the states of Veracruz, Zacatecas, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosi and Quintana Roo, have involved the capture of 17 of its leaders and plaza heads. Based on the number of detainees, I estimate that the group of key senior members has been greatly reduced,” he says. The capture of El Chapo or of Los Zetas’s top leader Heriberto Lazcano could be a game-changer. But the arrest of Lazcano would likely be more damaging for Los Zetas than the capture of El Chapo would be for the Sinaloa Federation, says Islas in an interview with Agora. He says the Sinaloa Federation is a maturer organization and with its horizontal leadership structure would better absorb the challenge of the loss of El Chapo than Los Zetas with its pyramid structure would if Lazcano were captured. He notes “board member disputes” could hurt the federation as was seen in the fallout of the quarrel between the Sinaloan leaders and their allies the Beltran Leyva brothers. But the federation has a basic strength “because it is based on family connections and alliances through marriages and kinship.” Last year saw significant geographical gains for Los Zetas in the struggle for mastery. A map breaking down cartel dominance and presence released by Mexico’s Office of Special Investigations into Organized Crime (OFDI) at a forum for crime experts at the National Institute of Penal Sciences suggests that Los Zetas is now operating in 17 Mexican states. The Sinaloa Federation is operating in 16 states. Four years ago, the Sinaloa Federation was operating in 23 states. Heriberto Lazcano’s crime organization maintains a presence in Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosi, Hidalgo, Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Tabasco , Chiapas, Yucatan and Quintana Roo. The Sinaloa Federation operates in Baja California Sur, Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, Guanajuato, Queretaro, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Veracruz, Quintana Roo, Baja California, Sonora, Jalisco, Colima and Guerrero. According to OFDI, the major flashpoints in terms of the struggle for mastery between the two cartels are in the states of Durango, Coahuila, Sonora, Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí. While Los Zetas may be operating now in more states than the Sinaloa Federation, the latter is not only the oldest but still the largest cartel with tens of thousands of operatives and gang members under its sway. El Chapo’s organization dominates most of western Mexico and controls Ciudad Juarez, a crucial drug plaza. Further, aside from the differences in command structure and membership, Los Zetas, who are primarily dealers, are in many ways less rooted in the drug business. “The Sinaloans are farmers – marijuana and heroin will always be grown by them,” says Islas. “They are producers and that is why they where able to develop the meth market.” He believes that Los Zetas’ greatest weakness lies in its membership base. “Their recruitment process is based on recommendations and this is why they are easier to infiltrate.” It is a vulnerability the cartel seems aware of: the cartel has a “counterintelligence apparatus to detect intruders and is more violent (than the Sinaloan Federation)” in order to enforce loyalty. Both cartels are expansionary further afield in Central America and the Caribbean. Central America offers vulnerable states with underfunded and ill-equipped armed forces and high levels of poverty, and Los Zetas has exploited that visibly in Guatemala, triggering alarm across the region. But of the two, say Mexican and Central American officials, the Sinaloa cartel is making more headway overseas, despite the publicity that has followed Los Zetas’ entry into Guatemala. According to PGR officials El Chapo is searching constantly to develop more international alliances and has highly developed ties and pacts across Latin America, Asia and West Africa. Since 2005 the Sinaloa Federation has pursued and cultivated ties in China, Thailand and India to secure precursor chemicals. In the last two years a series of arrests of Sinaloa operatives in the cocaine-producing states of Peru and Bolivia suggests that the Sinaloans are not nervous about moving into territory traditionally considered the preserve of Colombian organized crime. And that includes Colombia itself, where in 2009 more than seventy properties worth more than $50 million were seized by authorities linked to the Sinaloa Federation. At the time of the asset seizures, the Colombian police chief Oscar Naranjo said: “We have evidence of Mexicans sitting in Medellin, sitting in Cali, sitting in Pereira, in Barranquilla.” And El Chapo has increased the federation’s presence in the Caribbean, where authorities in the Dominican Republic say they have detected in the north of the island the presence of the Sinaloa cartel. Anibal de Castro, the Caribbean country’s ambassador to the United States, told a U.S. Senate hearing earlier this that the Sinaloa cartel “seeks to create a route to Europe via the Dominican Republic.” In the struggle for mastery, Los Zetas may go in for more gruesome and headline-catching violence, but according to a federal government study called “Information on the Phenomenon of Crime in Mexico,” until August 2010 at least the Sinaloa cartel was behind 84 percent of the drug-related slayings in Mexico.
Saturday, 22 January 2011
Mexican police rape allegations need outside investigation
It is in their own best interests to do so. In an area that relies exclusively on tourism, they have little choice. The confidence of the travelling public is at stake.
Rebecca Rutland, 41, says police in the Mexican resort town of Playa del Carmen took her and her fiance into custody on New Year's Eve. Whether police had reason to do so is not the issue. It is the couple's treatment after they were taken into custody that is in question.
Rutland says two police officers took turns raping her. She and her fiance, Richard Coleman, also allege officers robbed them of hundreds of dollars and other valuables. Mexican authorities deny the visitors' version of events and say the two were intoxicated."
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Flavio Mendez Santiago, known as 'El Amarillo', was arrested on Monday
The 35 year-old is said by police to have been one of the founders of Los Zetas, and was responsible for co-ordinating the trafficking of drugs and migrants throught the south.
Thousands of migrants from Central America hoping to travel through Mexico to to the US border are believed to fall victim to criminal organisations like Los Zetas every year. Some of them are recruited to traffic drugs in exchange for help in getting to the US, while others are kidnapped, then held to ransom. If the ransom is not delivered, they are often murdered."
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Saturday, 20 November 2010
Heavy fighting in and around Cd. Mier – Mexican military – It’s payback time
Two international crossings in Starr County, the Falcon Dam crossing and the Starr County bridge, were put on alert Wednesday afternoon."
Mexican army kills 11 in drug clash
PressTV - Mexican army kills 11 in drug clash: "Mexican troops have clashed with gunmen believed to belong to the 'Los Zetas' drug cartel, killing 11 of them, according to the Defense Ministry.
The ministry said the clashes took place in the state of Tamaulipas, near Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, a city that faces the US state of Texas across the Rio Grande, when a patrol responding to reports of armed men came to blows with them, AFP reported on Friday.
The gunmen opened fire on the patrol, triggering the firefight, the ministry said.
The gunfight led to the deaths of 11 gang members. Two men were also arrested, who confessed that they were members of the Los Zetas drug cartel.
Los Zetas was formed in the 1990s by former members of an elite military unit. The gang's main business is smuggling drugs into the United States. It also smuggles people across the border and engages in extortion and kidnapping.
Following the incident, soldiers seized 11kg of marijuana, nine rifles, four handguns, one rocket launcher and 22 cartridges for a variety of weapons."
Texas Governor Endorses U.S. Troops in Mexico | KTSM News Channel 9
Texas Governor Endorses U.S. Troops in Mexico | KTSM News Channel 9: "Texas' governor says it is time to send U.S. troops into Mexico to fight the drug war.
On MSNBC, Rick Perry said the murders of American citizens in Mexico is justification enough.
'I think we have to use every aspect of law enforcement that we have including the military i think we have the same situation that we had in colombia Obviously, Mexico has to approve any type of assistance that we can give them. But the fact of the matter is these drug gangs are people who are highly motivated for money, they are vicious, they are armed to the teeth. And I want to see them defeated,And any means we can to run these people off our border and to save Americans' lives, we have to be engaged in.'"
2 bodies hung from bridge, man beheaded in Tijuana
The bodies of two men were found hanging from the Los Alamos bridge early Friday, said Fermin Gomez, Baja California state's deputy attorney general for organized crime.
Both victims had their hands and feet bound and one had his head covered with a black plastic bag. One of the bodies fell into traffic when the rope broke.
A day earlier, a human head was found underneath another bridge in Tijuana, which sits across from San Diego, California. The body of the 24-year-old man was found 12 hours later alongside the highway from Tijuana to the beach town of Ensenada."
Monday, 25 October 2010
Thirteen retirees have been shot dead at a detoxification centre near the Mexican border city of Tijuana
Thirteen retirees have been shot dead at a detoxification centre near the Mexican border city of Tijuana, police say.
The reason for Sunday's attack was not immediately known, a police official told the AFP news agency, but it was apparently linked to the drug war that has claimed thousands of lives this year.
Elsewhere in the country, a mother and her two teenage children were killed in Torreon in the northern Coahuila state, when men in vans opened fire on a group of police patrol cars. The officers and soldiers returned fire.
It was not clear who fired the shots that killed the bystanders, but the state attorney general's office said it was investigating and expressed condolences to the victims' families.
"Because they were driving where the shooting took place, a 14-year-old boy, his 18-year-old sister and their 47-year-old mother were killed," the office said.
None of the criminals or the police officers were wounded in the firefight and no arrests have been made, officials said.
Coahuila has been the scene of bloody turf battles between the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas drug gang.
The woman who says her husband was gunned down by Mexican pirates now has a new mission.
After a long road trip, Tiffany Hartley is back in Colorado and says she plans to raise awareness about border violence.
Last month Tiffany and her husband David were jet skiing on Falcon Lake along the border of Texas and Mexico when they were attacked. Hartley says gunman in boats shot and killed David and she fled from the area because she was concerned for her safety. His body has not been found and it's believed the Zetas drug cartel is responsible.
"I had to leave him. I had to make that choice of leaving him and saving my own life," she said on Sunday in La Salle with her parents nearby. "That was the hardest decision ever."
Tiffany says she wants to keep this story in the news. She will soon be appearing on several national talk shows to continue telling David's story.
"I'd rather him be next to me, with me then having to do all this by myself," she said on Sunday.
The investigation into the case continues, but now with a federal focus from the Mexican government.
Tiffany remains optimistic about the investigation and thankful for American assistance.
"If Mexico doesn't let us in and doesn't let us help then their hands are tied. Now we are at the mercy of Mexico and their government," she said.
Tiffany said she'd like to speak to members of Congress of about the violence along the border.
"I don't want David's death to go in vain, but I want people in America to realize this is a big issue."
shooting death of U.S. citizen David Hartley on Falcon Lake was a mistake
Sources further reported that the murder of the lead Tamaulipas state investigator on the case, Rolando Armando Flores Villegas — whose head was delivered in a suitcase to the Mexican military’s Eight Zone headquarters in Reynosa on Oct. 12 — was a specific message from Los Zetas to Mexican authorities to back off from the investigation.
It has become obvious that a solid understanding if lacking of the context within which Hartley’s killing occurred was lacking in media discussions of the case. Viewing the murder as part of the bigger picture of what is occurring in Mexico makes it far easier to understand not only why David Hartley was killed, but why his body will likely never be found — and why his killers probably will not be held accountable for their actions, at least in the context of the judicial system.
There has been a growing fracture between the Gulf cartel and its former enforcement arm, Los Zetas, which had become an independent drug trafficking organization. Los Zetas were becoming increasingly aggressive and that the Gulf cartel was struggling to fend off these advances. In fact, it looked as if Los Zetas were about to swallow up the Gulf cartel.
What had been a tense standoff between the two cartels erupted into open warfare in January 2010 when Zeta leader Sergio “El Concord 3” Mendoza Pena died in an altercation between Mendoza and a group of men reporting to Gulf cartel No. 2 leader Eduardo “El Coss” Costilla Sanchez. After learning of Mendoza’s death, Los Zetas No. 2 Miguel “Z-40” Trevino Morales gave Costilla an ultimatum to hand over those responsible for Mendoza’s death by Jan. 25. When the deadline passed without his demand being met, Trevino ordered the kidnapping of 16 known Gulf cartel members in the Ciudad Miguel Aleman area as retaliation. The war was on.
Fearing the might of Los Zetas, the Gulf cartel reached out to their longtime enemies, the Sinaloa federation, and asked for their assistance in dealing with Los Zetas. The leader of the Sinaloa federation, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, has no love for Los Zetas, who as the former military arm of the Gulf cartel engaged in many brutal battles with Guzman’s forces. Together with another enemy of Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana (LFM), Guzman joined forces with the Gulf cartel to form an organization known as the New Federation. The stated goals of the New Federation were to destroy Los Zetas, along with the remnants of the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes (VCF) organization, aka the Juarez cartel.
A move by the New Federation to destroy the remnants of the Arellano Felix Organization (aka the Tijuana cartel), now very weak, would allow the organization to dominate Mexican drug smuggling routes into the United States. If this New Federation consolidation were to occur (it has not happened yet), it would also likely result in a dramatic decrease in violence in the long term. But the VCF and Los Zetas have not yet been vanquished. This means that while the New Federation clearly has been able to gain the upper hand over the past several months, both Los Zetas and the VCF continue a desperate fight for survival and turf that in the short term means the level of violence will remain high.
The emergence of the New Federation was accompanied by the collapse of the Beltran Leyva Organization, a group formerly allied with the Sinaloa federation that broke away from Sinaloa and allied with Los Zetas and the VCF to fight against El Chapo and his allies.
Three bystanders died in the crossfire of a shootout between gunmen, police and soldiers in northern Mexico
The victims were a 14-year-old boy and two women aged 18 and 47, according to a statement by the prosecutors' office in northern Coahuila state.
The statement said gunmen traveling in two vehicles opened fire on a convoy of federal police and soldiers in the city of Saltillo, Coahuila. The officers and soldiers returned fire.
It was not clear who fired the shots that killed the bystanders, but the state attorney general's office said it was investigating and expressed condolences to the victims' families.
"They are civilians who unfortunately died in the exchange of gunfire," it said, describing a running series of confrontations between police and assailants who allegedly fired shots into the air to clear bystanders from their path at one point.
Mexico's army, which has taken a leading role in combating drug gangs, has come under criticism for alleged indiscriminate use of force and firing on civilians.
Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/world/3-bystanders-killed-in-northern-mexico-shootout-toll-in-party-massacre-rises-to-14-105656428.html#ixzz13MERMBPi
death toll rose to 14 in the weekend massacre at a boy’s birthday party in Ciudad Juárez,
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Gunmen burst into the party in a small concrete house in a working-class Ciudad Juárez neighborhood on Friday and opened fire, killing 13 people immediately and wounding 20, state officials said. A 14th victim died in the hospital late Saturday night.
A 13-year-old girl was the youngest of the dead, which included several older teenagers. A 9-year-old boy was wounded.
Ciudad Juárez has become one of the most violent cities in the world since the Mexican government began its crackdown on drug cartels four years ago, and murder fueled by the drug trade has become so routine there that residents are not easily shocked. But the massacre on Friday night, like several other moments in the city this year, seemed to cross a line.
Mr. Calderón sent a message via Twitter, saying, “With sadness and profound indignation, the federal government expresses its most energetic repudiation of the murder of various young people in Ciudad Juárez.”
Gunmen in the Mexican city of Tijuana have shot dead 13 people at a drug rehabilitation centre
The attack appeared to be connected to the long-running violent conflict between drugs gangs in the the country, in which thousands have been killed.
On Saturday, 14 people, most of them teenagers, were shot dead at a party in the border city of Ciudad Juarez.
Last week, police in Tijuana destroyed 134 tonnes of cannabis - the largest drugs haul ever seized in the country.
The drugs, with an estimated street value of at least $340m (£214m), had been wrapped in 15,000 separate packages.
Police in Tijuana, just over the border from San Diego, California, said the latest killings happened when an armed gang burst into the Camino drug treatment centre in the city.
They lined the victims up and shot them with high-powered weapons, El Universal newspaper reported.
Drugs rehabilitation centres have been attacked by gunmen before - observers say the gangs accuse the clinics of protecting rival dealers.
Police also believe drug cartels use the clinics to recruit hitmen and smugglers, threatening to kill those who fail to co-operate.
Sunday, 10 October 2010
people in the car were Zetas cartel members; as the soldiers approached them, the gun battle began
mayor-elect of a small town in Oaxaca state has been slain
Antonio Jimenez, who was about to take over the mayor's post in Martires de Tacubaya, a town of 1,200, was murdered Friday on his way home from working in the country. There was no motive or suspect immediately known, police said.
Jimenez, 47, was a teacher and member of the center-left Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
Authorities have blamed the murders of the other mayors on organized crime and drug gangs.
Violence has spiraled across the country since President Felipe Calderon launched a military crackdown on organized crime gangs, involving some 50,000 troops, in 2006.
