Mexico City – News of five additional murders in Mexico’s increasingly lawless northern border region came Thursday as President Vicente Fox was hosting a summit in Cancun with U.S. counterpart George W. Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
A 45-year-old merchant was gunned down Thursday morning outside a 24-hour supermarket in Reynosa, according to Tamaulipas state police commander Carlos Leonel Lozano Gutierrez.
Wednesday, authorities found the bullet-riddled body of a man whose hands and feet were bound and whose eyes were bandaged. These latest murders bring to 10 the number of violent deaths reported so far this year in Reynosa, which lies just across the border from McAllen, Texas.
Another body was discovered Wednesday night in the Tamaulipas city of Nuevo Laredo, opposite Laredo, Texas, where the death toll since Jan. 1 is already approaching 70.
In that instance, the victim’s body bore a message reading: “for Los Chapos and the press,” indicating that the murder may have been carried out by a group of drug-cartel gunmen known as the Zetas, who have been battling with Los Chapos – enforcers for kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman – for control of Nuevo Laredo, a key distribution point for northbound drug shipments.
The reference to the press is consistent with a pattern of attacks and threats directed toward reporters covering the drug trade and the war raging along the border between Mexico’s leading cartels.
The body of a young woman was found Thursday morning in Ciudad Juarez, a city just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, that has become known worldwide for the more than 300 – mostly unsolved – slayings of woman and girls registered there since 1993.
The head of the special prosecutor’s office set up to investigate the spate of “femicides,” Flor Rocio Munguia, went to the scene of Thursday’s discovery, a dried-up irrigation ditch behind a school.
Munguia noted that the body bore no obvious signs of violence, while police said a preliminary examination indicated the woman had not been sexually assaulted.
In the Pacific coast city of Ensenada, a few hours south of San Diego, a businessman was killed Thursday morning minutes after leaving a downtown restaurant, possibly by the still-unidentified individual he met for breakfast, police said.
President Fox, whose term ends in December, last year launched an operation called “Safe Mexico” aimed at bringing down the level of violence in the northern border states, but the effort has so far brought mixed results. At one point last summer, the U.S. government registered a protest over the wave of killings by closing its consulate in Nuevo Laredo for a week.
