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Mass grave found in drug war

A Mexican Navy patrol boat intercepts a fishing boat on Friday to inspect it off Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, as part of a security operation being carried out. The government of President Felipe Calderon has initiated a campaign to fight drug smuggling and organized crime. PHOTO: AFP

The bound and gagged bodies of nine people have been found in a shallow grave in the violence-plagued state where Mexican President Felipe Calderon kicked off his crackdown on drug trafficking, officials said.

An anonymous call sent police to an abandoned warehouse in Uruapan, about 290km west of Mexico City in Michoacan state. There, officials removed a loose section of flooring and discovered the bodies, state prosecutor's office spokeswoman Magdalena Guzman said on Friday.

Officials on Thursday found the bodies of three men and one woman, their feet and hands tied together and their mouths covered with tape. The bodies of five other men were uncovered on Friday. All were in advanced stages of decomposition, indicating the victims had been killed some time ago.

Guzman said the female victim was identified by family members as 29-year-old Perla Soledad Almanza Rodriguez.

Police arrested the owner of the warehouse, his wife and four other men and women who were in the building, the federal Public Safety Department announced in a news release late on Friday.

Last month, Calderon sent 7,000 troops to his native state of Michoacan. Uruapan itself has been the site of some of the most brutal slayings in Mexico, including a Sept. 6 attack in which gunmen dumped five severed human heads onto a bar dance floor.

Drug gangs are blamed for more than 2,000 murders nationwide last year and have left a particularly bloody trail in Michoacan and in the northern border city of Tijuana, where more than 300 people were slain last year.

Tijuana police stayed off of patrols on Friday morning after soldiers sent by Calderon to crack down on drug gangs and corruption there seized most of their guns for inspection.

Tijuana Public Safety Secretary Luis Javier Algorri said that without arms it was too dangerous for the force of 2,000 police to patrol the streets of the city, where 13 officers were shot dead last year.

"This is an unfortunate situation because it leaves agents defenseless and does not allow them to serve the community," Algorri said in a news conference.

By the evening, however, many officers returned to duty without guns but with support from armed state police, said municipal police spokesman Fernando Bojorquez.

Calderon sent 3,300 soldiers and federal police into Tijuana on Tuesday to hunt down drug gangs. The soldiers swept police stations and took officers' guns for inspection on Thursday amid federal investigators' allegations that a corrupt network of officers supports smugglers who traffic drugs into the US.

On Friday, soldiers monitored those leaving and entering Tijuana, while federal and state police manned checkpoints within the city limits.

The federal Attorney General's office also said that officials had arrested seven alleged kidnappers in the border city of Mexicali and freed three of their victims.

Officials in the Pacific states of Sinaloa and Guerrero, home to the resort of Acapulco, said on Friday that the offensive may reach their cities soon. Both states have been plagued by waves of killings blamed on drug gangs.

"It's possible that in the next few weeks, there will be similar operations in Guerrero. It depends on the results in Tijuana and Michoacan," Guerrero Secretary-General Armando Chavarria said.

Opposition politicians have expressed doubts that Calderon's highly publicized campaign will have much of an impact. Calderon took office on Dec. 1 promising to crack down on drug gangs and other organized crime.

His predecessor, Vicente Fox, also designated thousands of agents to fight drug trafficking, arresting several alleged kingpins during his six-year term. But those actions appeared to spark more violence as other traffickers battled to take over the smuggling routes of those killed or detained.
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