27 Die in Drug-Related Violence in Mexico

At least 17 people died in drug-related violence in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, while 10 others were murdered in the southern state of Guerrero, officials said.

Four men were killed and a woman was wounded early Sunday in a shooting at the Las Cañas bar in Ciudad Juarez, which is in Chihuahua state and considered Mexico’s murder capital.

The victims have not yet been identified, officials said.

Gunmen killed three young men who were sitting in a car watching a soccer match in another section of Ciudad Juarez, located across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Relatives drove the victims, who ranged in age from 16 to 21, to a hospital, but they died on the way.

The bullet-riddled bodies of five men were found on the highway linking Chihuahua city, the state capital, and the city of Cuauhtemoc.

The men had been kidnapped Saturday night by a group of gunmen as they drove through Chihuahua city, police said.

Five young men, ranging in age from 18 to 25, were killed in an attack on the La Despedida bar in Camargo, a city in the southwestern part of Chihuahua.

Ciudad Juarez, where more than 5,000 people have been murdered since 2008, has been plagued by drug-related violence for years.

The murder rate took off in the border city of 1.5 million people in 2007, when more than 800 people were killed, then it more than doubled to 1,623 in 2008, according to press tallies, with the number of killings soaring to 2,635 last year.

The death toll for this year currently stands at more than 700, including 16 people massacred on Jan. 31 while attending a birthday party in the Villas de Salvarcar neighborhood.

Ciudad Juarez, with 191 homicides per 100,000 residents, was the most violent city in the world in 2009, registering a higher murder rate than San Pedro Sula, San Salvador, Caracas and Guatemala, two Mexican non-governmental organizations said in a report released earlier this year.

President Felipe Calderon’s administration has deployed about 5,000 Federal Police officers in the border city to try to stem a wave of violence unleashed by drug cartels battling for control of smuggling routes into the United States.

The Juarez and Sinaloa cartels, backed by hitmen from local street gangs, have been fighting for control of the border city.

La Linea is believed to be working for the Juarez cartel.

Press reports say the Sinaloa organization, Mexico’s oldest and largest drug cartel, has effectively taken control of Juarez.

In the southern state of Guerrero, meanwhile, 10 people were murdered on Sunday, state officials said.

Gunmen riding in three SUVs killed five men in the town of Xaltianguis just before 11:00 p.m. Sunday, the Public Safety Secretariat said.

Four people were murdered in separate incidents in Apaxtla de Castrejon, Tetipac, the Pacific port city of Acapulco and on the Zihutanejo-Acapulco highway, the secretariat said.

The man killed in Tetipac had been gagged and bound, but he was not shot, the secretariat said, without providing details on the cause of death.

The final victim identified in Guerrero was Gilberto Guzman Marcelo, a 50-year-old taxi driver who was beaten to death with stones in the city of Taxco de Alarcon, the secretariat said.

At 18:30 hours on Monday a municipal police officer was killed with an AK-47 "cuerno de chivo" at the entrance to La Villita, in the town of Navolato.

At the scene was the body of Juan Manuel Rivera Barraza 48.

A man was executed in Guasave Sinaloa with one bullet to the head. The man was identified as Enoc Quintero Morales Originally from Sinaloa de Leyva.

Two men were found executed with gunshots to different part o ftheir bodies. The bodies were found at the edge of an irrgation canal knwon as Rosales in Culiacan, Sinaloa. The victims were identified as Jorge Olivas and Daniel Alonso Ríos Higuera.