Officials in the northern
said high school students and others were at a private home celebrating
a school soccer victory when armed men rolled up in seven vehicles and
opened fire.
Eleven of the dead were under 20, officials said. At least 10 people were reported wounded.
The motive was not immediately clear. But gatherings in
El Diario, a daily newspaper in
during the last two years, with more than 3,700 people slain as two
drug gangs have waged a ferocious battle for control of the important
cross-border smuggling passage into nearby
Hit men in
have even hunted down their victims in fly-by-night drug-rehabilitation
centers. In one attack last year, gunmen killed 18 men in a treatment
center.
The killings have shown no signs of letting up in
the new year. More than 175 people have been slain in the city already
in 2010, according to unofficial tallies by Mexican media outlets.
The stubbornness and severity of the violence in
Early last year, the government created a force of
nearly 10,000 military troops and federal police to patrol the city’s
streets in an attempt to bring the killing under control while a new
local police force was being built. But after a brief dip in slayings,
the murder rate soared during the second half of 2009, and the death
toll of more than 2,000 topped that of a year earlier.
Last month, the Calderon administration took a new
tack. Amid widespread complaints that soldiers were trampling people’s
rights, the government decided to reduce the army’s profile by pulling
troops off the streets and sent in 3,000 more federal police officers
to carry out patrolling and investigative duties.
Elsewhere in
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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