Mexico City – At least 11 people have been murdered since the start of the weekend across Mexico bringing the number of people whose deaths have borne the marks of organized crime to some 855 so far this year.
Along the Huimanguillo-Estacion Chontalpa highway in the southern state of Tabasco, judicial police found the bodies of five men inside an SUV. All of them had been killed execution-style, a police spokesman told the press.
Police were only able to identify one of the men, cattle raiser Ponciano Vazquez Lagunas, who had disappeared two weeks ago.
Because of the way in which they were killed, police presume that their murders were part of a settling of scores among organized criminal groups.
In the northern border city of Tijuana, meanwhile, the bodies of five other men were found in three separate locations, police said, but they did not say whether any of them had been identified.
The governor of Baja California state, to which Tijuana belongs, Eugenio Elorduy, said he regretted the rash of killings, adding that they could have resulted from confrontations between drug traffickers and other organized criminal gangs.
And in Nuevo Laredo, just across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas, one man was murdered on Saturday and another was wounded in what appeared to be a targeted hit.
Sebastian Castillo Soto, 43, died when he was shot by several armed men inside a repair shop, and Juan Ramon Salas Ramirez, 22, was wounded.
Judicial police official Alejandro Loredo Perez told journalists that the preliminary investigation showed that several attackers used high-caliber weapons to kill Castillo Soto, a fact leading police to suspect the murder was linked to organized crime.
Nuevo Laredo, where 130 murders have been registered by authorities this year, is one of the Mexican cities that has been hardest hit by violent criminal gangs.
