Police find 28 more bodies near Texas border in one of the worst mass killings in Mexico's drug wars
Mexican detectives investigating a mass grave near the US border have found 28 more bodies, bringing to 116 the total number of victims in one of the worst mass killings in the country's drug wars.
The number of bodies taken to the city of Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, has overwhelmed local forensic services. Most of the dead are being held in a refrigerated meat truck in the morgue's car park.
Mexico's attorney general, Marisela Morales, said 17 suspects with ties to the Zetas drug cartel had been arrested in connection with the murders.
The Zetas, who are fighting their erstwhile allies in the Gulf cartel for control of Tamaulipas state, were also blamed for killing 72 Central and South American migrants in the same municipality in August last year. Survivors said that massacre followed an attempt to recruit the migrants as gunmen or drug mules.
The first bodies in the latest mass grave were discovered last week, after reports armed groups were pulling young male passengers off buses passing through the municipality of San Fernando.
Drug violence has killed more than 34,000 people since the president, Felipe Calderón, launched a military-led crackdown on the cartels in December 2006.
The latest discovery challenges the government's insistence that the majority of the killings are the result of inter-cartel conflict. It also underlines how ineffective the federal presence in Tamaulipas has been at stopping the carnage.
The interior minister, Francisco Blake Mora, said more troops and federal police had been sent to patrol the roads in the state. "Organised crime, in its desperation, resorts to committing extraordinary atrocities that we cannot and should not tolerate as a government and as a society," he said. "Those responsible for this massacre will be punished for it."
People from around Mexico looking for relatives who recently disappeared in the state have converged on Matamoros hoping and fearing that their search may be nearly over. Some expressed anger at the slow pace of the identification process and the inadequate support they feel they have received from the authorities, which so far has been limited to taking DNA samples.
"There isn't anybody to even offer us a glass of water," a woman looking for her brother said in an interview broadcast on W Radio. "The people in this country should understand that life is not worth anything here."
Bus companies continued to offer services but said they were taking security measures such as only driving during the day and changing timetables. Last week the US government warned American citizens not to travel along roads in Tamaulipas.