Mexico: Rash of violence sweeps Tamaulipas

Last week Mexican police uncovered the corpses of 72 migrants dumped in a Tamaulipas ranch. Sadly violence in that northern Mexican state did not cease over the weekend.

Gunmen murdered Marco Antonio Leal Garcia, the mayor of Hidalgo, on Sunday while he was driving his car. Authorities suspected that drug gangs were behind the attack against Leal, who was less than four months away from finishing his term as mayor of the town of 25,000 inhabitants. His four-year-old daughter accompanied him when he was gunned down yet she survived with some wounds.

Leal’s death came one day after a police station was bombed in Tampico while fifteen people in Reynosa were injured after unknown assailants lobbed grenades near the morgue where the 72 dead migrants were kept. On Friday, meanwhile, there were no fatalities after a pair of car bombs was detonated in the Tamaulipas capital city of Ciudad Victoria. On that same day, one of the investigators looking into the deaths of the migrants from several Latin American countries disappeared and his dead body may’ve been found.

President Felipe Calderon emphatically denounced the “cowardly crime and reprehensible violent acts” in Tamaulipas and last week introduced a measure designed to combat illegal money laundering. Earlier today the federal government fired 3200 police officers in a move designed to combat corruption. Yet it remains to be seen if these measures will be enough to calm northern Mexican residents fearful of more violence and migrants targeted for exploitation by criminals:

About 300 illegal immigrants took to the streets of Saltillo, the capital of the northern state of Coahuila, to protest the killings of 72 migrants at a ranch in northeastern Mexico last week.



The protesters, who wore masks, carried the flags of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.



Dozens of Mexicans joined the migrants to express their solidarity and condemn the fact that “killings are becoming a daily occurrence,” organizers said.

The Zetas drug gang has been blamed for the deaths of the 72 migrants whose whereabouts were tipped off by the massacre’s lone survivor, a young man originally from Ecuador. The Zetas and other drug organizations have fought for control of Tamaulipas as part of the deadly narcotics trade.

Image- BBC News
Online Sources- Al Jazeera English, AFP, UPI, LAHT, Bloomberg, BBC News