21 Die in Gun Battle Near U.S. Border

Nearly two dozen people were killed in a Mexican border area on Thursday during a fierce gun battle between suspected members of rival drug gangs, Mexican authorities said. The bloodshed took place only 12 miles from the U.S. border, in Sonora, a state that is a popular tourist destination famed for its beaches but whose interior has increasingly been consumed by drug violence. Prosecutors said the battle was a showdown between two rival drug and migrant-trafficking gangs, who sprayed gunfire at one another in a sparsely populated area near a dirt road between the hamlets of Tubutama and Saric, an area frequented by traffickers, the Associated Press reported. The shooting culminated in the deaths of 21 people, with Mexican authorities taking another nine people into custody, including six with bullet wounds. The Sonora state Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that nine people were captured by police at the scene of the shootings, six of whom had been wounded in the confrontation, according to the A.P. Eight vehicles and seven weapons were also seized. All of the victims were believed to be members of the gangs...more