Bodies of 13 teens found dumped in western Mexico
MONTERREY, Mexico - The bodies of 13 teenagers were dumped by the side of a dirt road outside a town in Mexico’s marijuana-producing state of Sinaloa, the latest mass killing in the country’s raging drug war, authorities and media said.
Passers-by found the bodies near a stolen truck in the early hours of Thursday. The victims had been shot and killed, possibly lined up first, the Sinaloa state attorney general’s office said.
Local media in Sinaloa said all the dead were teenagers.
It was the latest group killing since drug traffickers killed 11 people in a bar in Ciudad Juarez, near Texas, in October. In August, drug hitmen dumped 11 beheaded bodies in southern Mexico and killed 13 people, including a baby, in a tourist town in the northern state of Chihuahua.
President Felipe Calderon vowed, on taking office two years ago, to combat drug violence and has dispatched 45,000 troops and federal police across the country to tackle cartels.
But despite major drug seizures and arrests of kingpins, killings continue unabated. An unprecedented 4,700 people have died in drug violence this year as gangs fight over smuggling routes into the United States and clash with Mexican security forces.
Sinaloa is home to Mexico’s most-wanted man, drug lord Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, who is fighting the country’s other major cartels for control of the Mexican narcotics trade, worth around $40 billion a year
