Yikes!! This Mexico drug war mess keeps getting worse and worse! More than 40 bodies were found in just 24 hours after different battles broke out in different cities this weekend. In one city in particular, Monterrey, where the Zetas gang is fighting its former ally, at least 20 people died and more than five were injured when gunmen opened fire in a bar. Read the full story after the jump!
(DailyMail)–More than 40 bodies were found in Mexico in just 24 hours as vicious gun battles between rival drug cartels broke out in three different cities.
In the northern city of Monterrey, where the Zetas gang is fighting its former ally, at least 20 people died and more than five were injured when gunmen opened fire in a bar, in the city’s worst mass killing in recent memory.
Earlier police found one survivor in a pile of 11 bodies dumped near a well on the outskirts of Mexico City. All had been shot with high-powered rifles.
After those shootings on Friday, ten mutilated bodies were found early on Saturday morning in the northern city of Torreon. They had been shot several days before.
Federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire said: ‘The violence is a product of this criminal rivalry… surrounding the intent to control illegal activities in a community, and not the only the earnings that come with it, but also with transporting drugs to the United States.’
State officials said the bodies in Torreon, where the Zetas are fighting the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, were found in a sports-utility vehicle. Seven were men and three were women.
Violence has spiked in Monterrey since the Zetas broke their alliance with the Gulf cartel early last year.
In Friday’s shootings, 16 people died at the Sabino Gordo bar. Four others died later at the hospital and five were injured, said Jorge Domene, security spokesman for the state of Nuevo Leon, where Monterrey is located.
Other downtown businesses closed earlier than usual after news of the massacre broke.
In Valle de Chalco, a working class suburb southeast of Mexico City, a man was found alive among the dumped bodies and was taken to a hospital, said Antonio Ortega, a spokesman for the Mexico State police.
He said some of the bodies were blindfolded and had their hands tied. Poire said one woman was found seriously injured.
State officials said police found another body nearby a few hours later but could not confirm it was related to the mass attack, which happened during a fight between the Zetas and the Knights Templar, an offshoot of the infamous La Familia gang.
Ortega said he didn’t know if the victims were shot at the scene or were taken to site.
The capital region has been largely spared the widespread drug violence that grips parts of Mexico.
But some poorer areas of the sprawling metropolis of 20 million people have begun to see killings and decapitations committed by street gangs that are remnants of splintered drug cartels.
In another incident allegedly involving Zetas, the Mexican Navy said on Friday it rescued a Humberto Valdez, a former mayor of Reynosa, who had been kidnapped along with his son.
Four alleged Zeta members were arrested at the scene after an anonymous tip informed the navy of his abduction the day before.
Mr Poire repeated the government’s insistence that criminals, not the government’s crackdown on organized crime, are causing the violence.
More than 35,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderon stepped up the attack on organized crime in 2006, according to official figures. Some groups put the number at more than 40,000.
He said: ‘The violence won’t stop if we stop battling criminals. The violence will diminish as we accelerate our capacity to debilitate the gangs that produce it.’
Federal authorities arrested La Familia’s alleged leader in late June, claiming the arrest was a debilitating blow to the gang.
Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas was alleged to be the last remaining head of the cartel, whose splinter group, the Knights Templar, continues to fight for control of areas La Familia once dominated.
Mexican authorities also arrested Jesus Enrique Rejon Aguilar, a co-founder of the Zetas drug cartel who is suspected of involvement in the February killing of a U.S. customs agent.
