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1st September, 2010
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico: Mexico’s blood-soaked drug war intensified in northeastern Tamaulipas state over the weekend, with fresh violence attributed to the Zetas, the drug cartel blamed for slaughtering 72 illegal migrants.
In the latest flareup, unidentified gunmen murdered the mayor of Hidalgo, a small town in the western part of state, which borders Texas, a source in the state prosecutor’s office said.
Marco Antonio Leal Garcia, 46, was shot to death while he was driving his car, the source said. His four-year-old daughter was seriously wounded in the attack, the source said. Leal Garcia had taken office in January 2008 and was supposed to step down on December 31. The town of 25,000 people is located 60 miles (90 kilometers) northwest of the state capital, Ciudad Victoria.
Much of the violence in the area is blamed on the Zetas, a brutal, well-trained group of former elite Mexican army commandos that the US government calls the most dangerous organized crime syndicate in Mexico.
Attacks were reported in the coastal city of Tampico late Saturday, where two people were wounded when a police station was bombed.
Hours earlier two bombs exploded near a morgue in Reynosa, on the US border, where the bodies of the Central and South American migrants - 58 men and 14 women - slain Tuesday were being kept. Fifteen people were injured in the blast, local media reported.
Two car bombs exploded in Ciudad Victoria on Friday, one outside a major TV station and the other outside the public transport offices. Both caused material damage but no victims.
And a government official probing the massacre went missing Friday along with a police officer. Unconfirmed news reports said that their bodies were found Saturday on a road near the ranch where the migrants were gunned down. These attacks are a direct challenge to the government, Mexican analysts said Sunday.
The Zetas emerged in the late 1990s as hired guns for the powerful leader of the Gulf cartel, Osiel Cardenas. After Cardenas was arrested and extradited to the United States in 2007, the Zetas broke off and began a turf war with their former employers for control of drug smuggling routes into the lucrative US market.
“It’s clear that the Zetas are behind those explosions,” said Raul Benitez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City.
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