Thread: Drug violence overwhelms Tijuana

Drug violence overwhelms Tijuana

By The Associated Press
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 7:11 p.m.

TIJUANA, Mexico — This year was particularly tough for the already rough border city of Tijuana, besieged by drug violence and slammed by the economic downturn in the United States.

So far, more than 300 people have been killed in turf battles between rival drug traffickers and shootouts between gangs and federal security forces. Scores of bodies are buried in paupers' graves after not being claimed by their families.

Fear dominates life here. The violence has kept away thousands of revelers from across the U.S. border in San Diego who once flocked here to party at nightclubs along its main strip. Discos and bars that remain open often are empty, with strippers performing to bored employees.

Meanwhile, the city continues to swell with the unemployed. About 10,000 people have been laid off from factories that manufacture U.S. goods for export and that are suffering from the global financial crisis.

Tijuana also receives a large portion of Mexican deportees from the United States. Many arrive with no money to get back to their native towns in the interior of Mexico and wind up begging on the streets.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2009 ... s-tijuana/

Drug-related violence, bombings kill 50 in Mexico
(AFP) – 15 hours ago

TIJUANA — Ongoing violence between Mexico's drug cartels has killed at least 50 people in Mexico's north in recent days, as the governor's house and a police station came under bomb attack in central Michoacan state, officials said.

The attack with fragmentary bombs on the police station in Michoacan capital Morelia left a pregnant mother and her three-year-old daughter gravely injured, while nobody was hurt in the attack on the governor's mansion, local police told AFP.

Police said the explosive devices were hurled by gunmen from three passing vehicles.

The attacks were attributed to growing violence between rival local drug cartels La Familia and the Zetas.

In northern Chihuahua state, bordering with the United States, 18 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, and two more in Chihuahua city in the past 24 hours of drug-related violence, local police said.

Between Sunday and Monday, at least 30 people were killed in northern Mexico -- nine in Tijuana, across the US border from San Diego, California, including a man whose body was found hanging from a bridge with a threat stapled to his corpse.

And in Chihuahua, police counted 21 murders, including 10 in the town of Ciudad Juarez during the same period.

Elsewhere in the state, authorities found a decapitated body in the area of Parral, and reported that two children were burned alive in a blaze started by an unidentified commando.

More than 2,500 people have been killed since the beginning of the year in Ciudad Juarez alone, making the border town the most violent in Mexico and one of the most dangerous in the world.

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon has dispatched some 50,000 troops to the city and said in November he intended to keep the forces there in an effort to tackle the ongoing violence.

The country's border region is home to a fierce battle between drug cartels vying for control of lucrative smuggling routes into the United States.

Violence related to the drug trade has killed more than 14,000 people since December 2006.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... MZiUaTPxcQ

Oh. Good. Now they're using bombs.