Mexico Drug Violence Leaves 16 More Dead

Drug-related violence in Mexico in recent hours has left 16 dead, 12 in the northern state of Chihuahua and four others in the western state of Jalisco, officials said. The prosecutor’s office for the northern zone of Chihuahua said Friday that four people were shot dead and three others wounded in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s murder capital. Local police said the victims of the gun violence were having a party in the patio of a home in the city’s downtown when a group of suspected cartel hit men entered and opened fire. Authorities have not yet identified the victims and the motive for the killings remains unclear. A hardscrabble city that lies across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juarez is the scene of a war for control of smuggling routes into the United States between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels, a turf battle that has led to some 2,300 drug-related homicides thus far this year. Separately, four people were shot and killed Friday morning on a road linking the towns of Guadalupe and Praxedis, near Ciudad Juarez. According to authorities, the assailants forced the victims to step out of an SUV and then gunned them down on the road...more