Mexican police found 26 bodies on Thursday on a main boulevard in Guadalajara, the nation’s second-largest city, a local official said.
The bodies were found in vehicles abandoned near a local landmark known as the Millennium Arches, Jalisco state Government Secretary Fernando Guzman told reporters. The bodies, which had gunshot wounds and signs of asphyxiation, were marked with the word “Zetas” — the name of a violent drug cartel based in eastern Mexico.
The deaths came one day after authorities in the northwestern state of Sinaloa reported the killings of 26 people in three different municipalities, including the state capital Culiacan. The Sinaloa Cartel is based in that state and also has a strong presence in Jalisco, where Guadalajara is located.
Guadalajara, a Mexican technology hub, had seen fewer drug-related deaths than other cities, but this week’s killings show that any Mexican city can be hit by violence related to organized crime, said Javier Oliva, a security analyst at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.
Veracruz, an important port on the Gulf of Mexico, saw violence surge when 67 bodies were discovered in two incidents in September and last month. In Monterrey, Mexico’s third-largest city, an arson attack on a casino killed 52 people in August.
In the killings on Wednesday, 16 of the victims were burned, while 10 were killed with high-powered weapons, the Mexico City daily El Universal reported on its Web site.
The federal government will assist with both investigations “to ensure that these crimes do not go unpunished,” Mexican Secretary of the Interior Alejandro Poire said on Thursday.
Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office on Dec. 1 2006, almost 43,000 people have died in organized crime-related deaths, according to an Oct. 4 report by the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
Mexico’s government estimates that drug-related violence shaves 1.2 percentage points off output annually in Latin America’s second-biggest economy.
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