death toll rose to 14 in the weekend massacre at a boy’s birthday party in Ciudad Juárez, the Chihuahua State attorney general’s office said Sunday.
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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.”
narcoblogger has stepped into the breach left by Mexican journalists, who dare not report as they used to do. Thirty journalists have been killed in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon started his war on the drug cartels in 2006, making Mexico the most deadly country in Latin America for the media. Most are victims of the drug cartels, not caught in crossfire but targeted for reporting what is going on.
Last month, four reporters from the central Mexican state of Durango were kidnapped after reporting a prison riot, which followed the revelation that the prison governor was allowing inmates to go out at night and commit murders. The journalists were freed only after their TV station agreed to broadcast a video, produced by one of the drug cartels, which showed corrupt policemen who were apparently working for a rival cartel.
Today, attention has turned to Tamaulipas state where police have found 72 unburied bodies dumped on a ranch. They are presumably victims of the ever more vicious drug war, which in this part of Mexico pits Los Zetas against the Gulf Cartel. In recent weeks, the industrial city of Monterrey, Mexico’s wealthiest, has been almost brought to a standstill by cartel road blocks, kidnaps and gunbattles, following the murder of a local mayor. Police chiefs, political candidates and senior state officials are frequently targeted for assassination. The drug gangs are trying to seize the Mexican state, and closing down the media is just one part of their plan.
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