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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2006 
Shoot-Out Between Mexican Drug Gangs Leaves Three Dead
 Ioan Grillo - Associated Press
| | The mountainous Michoacan state is used by gangs to grow marijuana and the opium poppies used to make heroin. |
Mexico City – A shoot-out between suspected drug gangs left three men dead before dozens of police and soldiers stormed the scene and arrested the gunmen in the central Mexican state of Michoacan, police said Saturday.
The slayings were the latest in a wave of drug-related bloodshed that has killed more than 2,000 people across Mexico since the beginning of 2005.
The shoot-out erupted Friday in the community of Las Anonas about 250 miles (400 kilometers) west of Mexico City, said Victor Baltasar, spokesman for Michoacan state police.
Federal agents, soldiers and state police, who have been carrying anti-drug operations in the area, rapidly responded by sealing off the scene and moving in to arrest four suspected drug smugglers, Baltasar said.
Some of the detainees were using a pickup truck with insignia from the Federal Agency of Investigation, Mexico's equivalent of the FBI. Baltasar said the insignia was fake and the gangsters were posing as federal agents.
Drug gangs have been known to dress as police officers and sometimes carry out fake arrests, later killing their detainees or holding them for ransom. There are also numerous cases of Mexican police being on the payroll of drug traffickers.
Last week, Federal agents arrested 47 police officers in the Michoacan town of Apatzingan for alleged links to an extremely violent drug gang known as the “Zetas.”
President Vicente Fox has called for the “mother of all battles” against drug gangs and arrested several high-profile cartel leaders. But investigators say the arrests have led to more violence as up-and-coming traffickers battle for the routes of the jailed kingpins.
The mountainous Michoacan state is used by gangs to grow marijuana and the opium poppies used to make heroin. It is also part of trafficking routes for Colombian cocaine going to the United States. |
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