| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | October 2008 
Mexico Drug Wars Kill Nearly 400 in Two Weeks
 Agence France-Presse
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| | The corpse of a Mexican policeman shot dead by assassins lies on the street in Rosarito, Baja California state, on October 16. Almost 400 people have died in the past two weeks in an intensifying drugs war in Mexico despite a government crackdown on cartels, trafficking and related violence. (AFP/Said Betanzos) | | |
Mexico City – Almost 400 people have died in the past two weeks in an intensifying drugs war in Mexico despite a government crackdown on cartels, trafficking and related violence.
The killings include six people lined up and shot against a wall with a written warning promising a similar fate to all "rats", and five others shot dead in a house where a ganglord's corpse was found in a freezer.
The death toll this year has crossed 3,800 despite a massive state crackdown launched two years, including the deployment of some 36,000 soldiers across the country.
The drug wars, ongoing for years in Mexico, has seen a spiral in violence since August.
Newspaper tolls, published daily, show 387 people were killed in the first two weeks of October, and more than 3,800 deaths recorded since the start of the year.
The killings are concentrated in the northern border regions, where cartels are fighting over key trafficking routes into the United States.
The main cartel in Tijuana is led by the Arellano Felix brothers, and is battling other groups for control of the strategic border city across from San Diego, California.
Further east along the border, in Ciudad Juarez and across Chihuahua state, the Juarez cartel, led by the Carillo Fuentes familly, is fighting with the Sinaloa gang, led by fugitive Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Deserters from both sides are also involved.
Authorities blame many attacks on drug traffickers, and evidence signalled drug gang involvement in recent killings.
One of the six shot dead against a wall on Thursday in volatile Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, managed to blame a drug cartel for the killings before he died.
He said he had been accused by the killers of selling drugs for a rival gang.
The assassins had fired more than 100 bullets and left a note at the scene of the crime, warning: "Message for all rats, this will continue."
The previous day a soldier and four delinquents were killed in Tijuana, in a house where the body of a kidnapped and murdered gang member lay in the freezer.
Some blame increased Mexican cocaine consumption for the spike in violence. Until recently, cocaine was mainly exported to the United States.
Mexico "is no longer only a country of drug transit to the United States, but has become an important consumer market," federal prosecutor Eduardo Medina Mora said recently.
National drug consumption rose by around 30 percent between 2002 and 2008, and by almost 100 percent for cocaine, the prosecutor said, citing a federal investigation. |
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