Seventeen Mexican drug gang members were killed near the US border on Saturday, their bodies scattered along a road after one of the deadliest shootouts in Mexico’s three-year narco-war.
Rival factions of the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border battled each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said.
Fourteen bodies were lying in pools of blood on a road near assembly-for-export maquiladora plants on the city’s eastern limits. The corpses were surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings and many of their faces were destroyed.
Bullet holes could be seen in the walls of a factory building and on the perimeter wall of a housing complex along the road, but no bystander deaths were reported. It was not clear how long the gunbattles lasted.
The 15th body was found nearby. Two more men died in hospital on Saturday evening, police said.
Six men were wounded and six others arrested, but some gang members are thought to have escaped.
Two of the dead were believed to be senior hitmen for the Arellano Felix cartel and were identified by large gold rings on their fingers. The rings carried the icon of Saint Death, a ghoulish figure that gangsters believe protects them, police said.
“Today shows we are facing a terrible war never seen before on the [US-Mexico] border,” Baja California Attorney General Rommel Moreno told a news conference.
Some 190 people have been killed in Tijuana so far this year. Last year there were more than 2,500 drug killings across Mexico and there have been more than 900 this year.
Police cordoned off the surrounding roads, forcing workers at a nearby maquiladora to walk through the crime scene to get to work.
Heavily armed federal police patrolled across Tijuana after the gunfight. Soldiers and police guarded the city’s main hospital where the wounded were being treated to prevent any attempt by drug gangs to pull them out.
Baja California state police chief Daniel de la Rosa said fresh troops from Mexico City were arriving in Tijuana, which borders San Diego, California.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has sent thousands of troops to Tijuana and Baja California state since taking office in December 2006. Some 25,000 soldiers and federal police are deployed to fight cartels in drug hot spots across Mexico.
The army in Tijuana said it was on high alert for reprisals against soldiers and federal police after the shootout and the ensuing arrests.
“The risk of attacks against our agents after an event like this is extremely high,” Tijuana police chief Lieutenant Colonel Julian Leyzaola said.
The Arellano Felix gang was long the dominant trafficking organization in Tijuana, smuggling drugs into California.
Recently the group has been under attack from a rival gang from the Pacific state of Sinaloa, led by Mexico’s most wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS