Mexico, July 16: Mexico’s drug wars have claimed 17 more lives as cartels hit back at a government squeeze on their operations in the country’s north.
Judicial sources said that two police officers had been shot dead driving in an official car through Chihuahua, the capital of the eponymous northern border state that has seen much of the bloodshed.
The attack was carried out using a 0.50 caliber weapon — often used “by drug traffickers to kill police,” said the official, who asked not to be named.
Chihuahua state shares long borders with the US states of Texas and New Mexico.
In the border city of Ciudad Juarez, where 1,650 people died in 2008 amid the deployment of 8,500 soldiers, 10 men were executed. Officials reported another five deaths across the state.
The Mexican government has deployed 36,000 federal troops across the country since 2006 to crackdown on cartels shipping cocaine and other drugs to the United States.
The cartels have hit back with ever-more violent methods, beheading their victims and launching audacious attacks on federal authorities.
One group, dubbed “La Familia,” has claimed responsibility for the recent killing of 12 federal police officers whose bodies were found on Monday piled atop one another along a road in the western state of Michoacan.
—–Agencies