A sudden burst of violence across Mexico is reminding citizens that the government’s war on drug cartels is far from over. In the state of San Luis Potosi, 14 bodies were discovered in an abandoned truck. In Acapulco, no less than 17 homicides have been reported since Sunday, along with another 12 murders reported within a single day in Mexico City. As the country nears the seventh year of its high-scale war against drug violence, organized cartels show no sign of slowing down.
Near a gasoline station on the highway between the city of San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas, authorities found the abandoned truck carrying the bodies of 14 male victims. Each of the men hailed from the nearby border state of Coahuila. Though “body dumps” along the highways of the Mexican border have become standard practice by Mexico’s cartels, the violence had not spread as far as San Luis until recent months. The mass killings in the border area are the result of fighting between the two most powerful cartels, the Sinaloa and the Zetas, who battle each other as well as federal forces.
Among those reported dead in Acapulco were a pregnant woman and a 3-year-old boy, casualties in the struggle between smaller drug-trafficking gangs in the region. The two were killed along with a man and two other women on Wednesday morning, in the low-income neighborhood called Colonia Ampliacion 5 de Mayo, according to local papers. In addition, a dozen more murders have been reported in Acapulco this week.
Mexico City, which is often seen as exempt from much of the drug-related violence that burdens the rest of the country, saw 12 deaths in a 24-hour period. Four men were gunned down during a neighborhood festival in Iztapalapa on Tuesday afternoon for undisclosed reasons, while Wednesday morning saw the owner of a suburban bar and his five employees shot to death by a gang, as part of a rumored extortion plot.
When Mexico last September released the murder toll from the first five years of the drug war, the official count stood at 47,515 lives that had been claimed. But independent analysts and peace activists have estimated that the toll could now stand well over 60,000, with another 10,000 missing. Mexican officials have requested aid from the U.S. government, citing the demand for illegal drugs in America as a central factor in the rise of powerful cartels. While U.S. forces do provide some backing to Central American states in the battle against drug trafficking, Mexican officials want the U.S. government not only to provide defense, but to try to reduce demand.
“We are next to the largest illegal drug market in the world,” Mexican President Felipe Calderon said in September at a public dinner held in his honor by the Council of the Americas in Washington. “We are living in the same building, and our neighbor is the largest consumer of drugs in the world and everyone wants to sell him drugs through our door and our window.”
