Five youths between the ages of 17 and 20 were shot and killed early Saturday in a suburb of this northern Mexican industrial city, security officials in Nuevo Leon state said.
Police received a report early Saturday that five bodies had been dumped in plain view on a road on the north side of Monterrey’s metropolitan area, a spokesperson for the state’s Security Council said, adding that the killings bore the hallmarks of gangland violence.
Detectives with the State Investigations Agency arrived at the Monterrey suburb of San Nicolas de los Garza’s Valle del Nogalar neighborhood, where the bodies were dumped, to inspect the crime scene.
The five youths had “the look of gang members” and had each been shot multiple times, the spokesperson said.
Investigators were trying to determine if the five victims may have been killed in another part of the city, since only one spent shell casing was found on the street.
Nuevo Leon, which borders Texas, has seen about 1,000 homicides this year, most of them connected to a brutal turf war between the Gulf and Los Zetas drug mobs.
Monterrey, a metropolis of 4 million people, is home to many of Mexico’s industrial giants and long seemed to be immune to the drug war that has claimed more than 40,000 lives nationwide since December 2006, when newly inaugurated President Felipe Calderon militarized the struggle with the cartels.
But that city and its suburbs have been battered by a wave of drug-related violence since March 2010.
Elsewhere, a municipal police officer in the violence-wracked northern border city of Ciudad Juarez was shot dead and another officer was wounded by suspected cartel hit men Saturday underneath an international crossing.
The attack occurred when at least four men in two SUVs drove up to the police, who were patrolling the area in an all-terrain vehicle, and opened fire with assault rifles.
U.S. authorities on the other side of the border temporarily closed the international bridge as a safety precaution while the District Attorney’s Office of Ciudad Juarez was carrying out its preliminary investigation.
The slain officer was identified as Victor Moreno, who, according to local media, had already been shot at by gunmen on two other occasions just over two months ago; the wounded police was reportedly in serious condition.
Last year alone, more than 3,100 organized crime-related homicides occurred in Ciudad Juarez, which is located across the border from El Paso, Texas, and is the largest city in Chihuahua state.
Home to 1.4 million people, Juarez has one of the world’s highest annual murder rates per 1,000 inhabitants.
At least 14,000 “armed criminals” are in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua city, the state capital, working for the drug cartels that are fighting for control of smuggling routes into the United States, Chihuahua state Attorney General Carlos Manuel Salas said earlier this year.
About 5,500 of the armed criminals operating in Ciudad Juarez belong to Los Aztecas, a gang that works as the armed wing of the Juarez cartel, while the rest work for the Sinaloa cartel, Salas said.
There only getting younger
ReplyDeleteIts amazing to me how none of these idiots bever think that they are going to be the next victim...is it really stupidity or greed that blinds them to the fact that they are nothing more than expendable toilet paper no matter what cartel or gang they are in..I hate to be so calloused but I almost some of these guys surely deserve what they get....keep them from reproducing.
ReplyDeleteTexcoco Mex said
ReplyDeleteAnon August 9, 2011 4:56 PM You got that right, yesterday 4 people got arrested including a 13 year old girl and she told police she was working as a lookout for the zetas.
Mexico needs to work on their education system quickly because these kids have to choose a hopeless poor life or a dangerous life that pays them. I know that if i were young and poor living in mexico, it would be really tempting to choose the narco life.
ReplyDelete@ ajulio what do you mean their education system? What Mexico needs to get together is their parenting skills and become better parents for their children. This has nothing to do with poverty. All of my family grew up dirt poor, slept on a dirt floor in a shack made out of galvanized metal. NONE of them grew up to a life of crime. My other close relatives also grew up in the same situation and guess what, no criminals! So please drop the liberal babble and take some responsibility already!
ReplyDeleteEl_Regio: You are absolutely right! I too grew up poor along with many others. As far as I know, none that I am aware became thugs, gangsters, or criminals.
ReplyDeleteBTW: I think many parts of the world are having problems with youth due, in part, to bad parenting and a breakdown in civilizing values and morals. This point was just made by an English scholar talking about the youth riots in England this week.
Mexico Watcher
@ el regio
ReplyDeleteGood for you and your family. Some people are happy living dirt poor. I agree with you that an education alone won't make the world a perfect place. Look at all the educated lawyers, judges, politicians who are mainly responsible for mexico's problem's.
It does begin with parents teaching their children discipline. I think that mexicans are good people but they have the tendency to be lazy disciplinarians. They let their children roam around the streets all night. In the past, this was not as dangerous. But now, it can be very deadly.
This has everything to do with poverty. Young teenagers who have no education and have nothing to look forward to join the gangs because they don't want to live the blue collar lives that they saw their parents live. They choose a more glamorous lifestyle that gives them status and pays them quickly, not a job at a maquiladora where they have to bust their asses 60 hours a week for $40.00
Education is the key to a productive country. Knowledge is the key to the value of life. But mexico's education system is specialized for the rich. Their are less public schools in mexico and becoming more private schools which the poor cannot afford. So after middle school, teens are left on the streets with no future. If mexican parents had one or two children, maybe they could afford schooling for them. But many mexican moms pop out children like an assembly line and cannot afford to pay for 8 children. There is the problem.
As far as me being a liberal, don't worry about me. I am not the root or the answer to these problems. I cannot fix mexico's problems for them. But if you want to, be my pleasure. But you're first gonna have to remove the Big stick up your ass.
@ El Regio
ReplyDelete¿ Y todavía vives en Nuevo León?
some people say the stupidist things. these same people believe in fabrications and speak with falsification.
ReplyDeletea good education system is not important. poverty is not a problem.
these are the stupidist things i've ever read.
Who's Next?
Who are you estipidos kidding? These so called sicarios aren't making any money, How many times have we read after they get caught that they are on salary for less than 1000 a month, and that's not american money that's mexican money, these cartels don't pay these killers what they use too because there are so many willing to join and kill just for the percieved glamour. Only the commondantes and sicarios like el diego make the real money...not these low on the totem pole clowns
ReplyDeletei dont really dont care if they are young, poor, or if they lack education.
ReplyDeletewhat i do care about is the horrific crimes these people keep doing and all for DRUGS MONEY AND POWER!?
they are cold hearted crazy people that just like to kill or kidnap or rape for 100 bucks
i have family members living in Mexico and i pray everyday that they dont see something like this, that they wont be victims of crimes like these. i live in fear of receiving a phone call saying ".... has been killed/kidnapped/mutilated etc"
what i really would like is for us that live in a safer place be grateful and keep them in our prayers...
What this article fails to mention is that Monterrey, Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana have had that American gang culture for 20 years or so, the gang culture mixed with narco trafficking/organized crime is a very dangerous recipe. That's why you see more younger folks getting killed in Monterrey and Juarez more than anywhere else in the country.
ReplyDelete