25 die (violently) in Mexican state on single day

[wildcard]

Viva diversidad

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/09/10/mexico.violence/index.html?hpt=T2

25 die in Mexican state on single day

By the CNN Wire Staff
September 10, 2010 8:25 p.m. EDT

(CNN) -- With 25 people killed in violent outbreaks, Thursday was one of Chihuahua state's deadliest days of the year, the state Investigations Agency said on Friday.

Seven of the victims were women and girls and two were 15 years old, said agency spokesman Arturo Sandoval. One of the males killed was 17, he said.

Additionally, Sandoval said, 14 of the fatalities took place in three incidents in one hour.

In the most violent incident, six people who had gathered outside a house were killed when several men opened fire with AK-47 rifles and 9mm guns. More than 70 shots were fired, and the victims -- ranging in age from 15 to 67 -- were found sprawled in the street.

In Juarez's Granjas de Chapultepec neighborhood, four members of the same family were shot and killed. Two older women were shot in the garage, and two teenaged siblings were found in a closet.

The Reuters news agency said it was the deadliest day in Juarez since 2008, when the raging drug war began in earnest.

Nearly 30,000 people have been killed in drug violence since the government's bloody war on organized crime began in 2006.

The drug cartels are now suspected in the deaths of three mayors in less than a month. The most recent, Mayor Alexander Lopez Garcia of El Naranjo in San Luis Potosi state, was gunned down in his office Wednesday, officials said.

[wildcard]

25 slain in Ciudad Juarez
Attacks by drug gangs result in the city's worst death toll in two years. Farther east along the border, 85 inmates escape.

September 11, 2010

ciudad juarez, mexico —

Gunmen killed 25 people in a series of drug gang attacks in Ciudad Juarez, police said Friday, marking the deadliest 24 hours in more than two years for the Mexican border city. And farther east on the border, 85 inmates scaled the walls of a prison and escaped.

Despite the violence, President Felipe Calderon hotly disputed a statement this week by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that Mexico resembled Colombia two decades ago, when the South American country was in the grip of a drug-financed insurgency.

"These kind of comments like the ones made by Secretary of State Clinton … damage Mexico's image terribly," Calderon told the Spanish-language network Univision. "I think the main thing we have in common with Colombia is that both of our countries suffer from U.S. drug consumption."
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The toll in Thursday's killings included 15 people slain when attackers stormed four homes in three hours, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the attorney general's office of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located.

Sandoval said it was the highest single-day murder toll since March 2008 for the city, which lies across the border from El Paso.

In Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, 85 inmates — 66 of them convicted of or on trial for federal charges including weapons or drug possession— scaled a prison's 20-foot walls using ladders, said Jose Garza Garcia, Tamaulipas state public safety secretary.

Garza Garcia said 44 prison guards and employees were under investigation. Two were missing. "The guards evidently helped in the escape," he said.

So far this year, 201 inmates have escaped in Tamaulipas.

Ciudad Juarez, with a population of 1.3 million, has become one of the world's most dangerous cities amid a turf war between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels.

More than 2,100 people have been killed this year in the city, putting it on pace to surpass its previous high of 2,700, set last year.

Daily homicide tolls routinely reach double digits in Juarez. On Aug. 15, 24 people were killed.