20-year-old Mexican police chief fired

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Mexican drug cartels targeting rehab centers...

Why Mexico's drug gangs target rehab centers
June 9, 2011 - Mexico's drug gangs frequently target private, unlicensed rehabilitation centers, which have less security than government-licensed rehabilitation centers.

The events seemed like something out of a gangster film. According to Mexico’s El Universal, at around 5:30 p.m. on June 7, five vehicles pulled up outside the Victory Center for Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation in Torreon, Coahuila, in northern Mexico. A gang of heavily-armed men emerged from the cars, and burst into the clinic. Methodically moving from room to room, they opened fire on everyone in sight, killing 13 patients and workers. Then, as quickly as they had arrived, the assailants climbed back into their cars and fled the scene.

Although such extreme violence at a treatment center may seem incomprehensible, attacks on these institutions are becoming a fairly common phenomenon in Mexico. To date, the bloodiest of these shootings was in June 2010, when a gunman killed 19 people in a drug rehabilitation center in the city of Chihuahua, which borders Coahuila. Mass shootings of this sort, with a defenseless group of people indiscriminately gunned down, have become common in Torreon, though typically the incidents have occurred in bars.

Prior to the June 7 murders, there had been at least five such incidents, resulting in more than 50 deaths, since the beginning of 2010. In most of the cases, official reports blamed the killings on local representatives of the Sinaloa Cartel, who are based in neighboring Gomez Palacio and have been engaged in a year-long battle with Torreon-based Zetas for control of the area.

Killed to minimize the risk

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Teen survives being shot, hung from Mexico bridge
Fri, Jun 10, 2011 - TORTURED:Three people found near the bridge over a busy Monterrey highway had been tortured and shot, and their hands had been bound with duct tape

A kicking, screaming teenager with a gunshot wound was found dangling from a rope over a busy highway on Wednesday in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey. Police said another man alongside him was dead by the time rescuers arrived and a third was found dead below. Witnesses told police that a group of gunmen descended from a vehicle and hanged the men off a bridge at about 10am, stopping traffic along one of the busiest routes in Mexico’s third-largest city, which has been plagued by drug-gang violence. All three had been shot and tortured, and their hands were bound with duct tape, according to a Nuevo Leon State police investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.

The dead man, estimated to be in his early 20s, dangled lifelessly in a blue shirt and plaid shorts. Bound in his hands was a mobile phone, a possible sign that he was considered an informant. Police said none of the victims had been identified. Two other men, one with a foot cut off, were hanged by their necks from a pedestrian bridge on Sunday in Monterrey. Both died. The city has seen a spike of violence since the Gulf and Zeta cartels began fighting for control of drug traffic two years ago. In a state where the drug cartel La Familia is based, police discovered at least 26 bodies piled up at six different sites in the outskirts of Morelia, the capital of Michoacan. Officials said on Wednesday they believe all the murders are connected, but gave no motives for the crimes.

Michoacan State police said the victims appeared to have been asphyxiated — either hanged or drowned — and all showed signs of torture. In the Pacific coast resort city of Acapulco, police unearthed 10 bodies — two women and eight men — in a mass grave, officials said on Wednesday. Acapulco has become the scene of bloody cartel turf battles. Omar Juarez Lozano, a commissioner in Acapulco, alerted police after smelling a foul odor in a lot of a residential neighborhood. Police and soldiers dug and found the 10 bodies on Wednesday, placed them in plastic bags and transporting them to Acapulco’s morgue in ambulances. Police would continue excavating, officials said.

Also on Wednesday, Mexican authorities said that two men wounded in an attack on a drug rehabilitation center in the northern city of Torreon died, raising the number of fatalities in the incident to 13. Coahuila State prosecutors said in a statement issued on Wednesday that two assailants stormed into the center on Tuesday afternoon and opened fire. It was not yet clear what the motive for the attack was or which gang was responsible. Drug cartels are known to use rehab centers to recruit addicts and rival gangs sometimes attack. Dozens of people have died in shootings at centers across Mexico.

Teen survives being shot, hung from Mexico bridge - Taipei Times