By IANS,
Mexico City : Twelve people have been arrested in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero in connection with the massacre of 24 people last week presumed to be linked with the ongoing war among the country’s drug mafias.
The army and the federal police in a joint operation arrested the suspects, 11 men and a woman, from a house in the town of Arcelia, EFE news agency reported Monday quoting state officials.
Police Friday discovered 24 bodies near a popular recreational area west of the capital of Mexico.
The daily Milenio, quoting investigators, said available clues suggested the victims had been abducted days earlier in Arcelia by rival drug group and were executed in a row, the deadliest single incident of criminal violence in Mexico in the past few months.
There was no official word on the identity of any of the killed.
El Universal newspaper reported that the carnage could be linked to an ongoing battle over the control of heroin and cocaine smuggling routes between the Los Pelones and the Los Zetas drug cartels.
The paper reported that last Friday was “the single most violent day of the year,” with 41 killings nationwide.
Mexico has been plagued in recent years by drug-related violence, with powerful cartels battling one another and the security forces, as rival gangs vie for control of lucrative smuggling and distribution routes.
Armed groups linked to Mexico’s drug cartels murdered around 2,700 people in 2007, and the toll this year has already crossed 3,000, according to unofficial estimate published recently by El Universal.
Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking groups are the Tijuana cartel, the Gulf cartel and the Sinaloa cartel. Two other large drug trafficking organisations, the Juarez and Milenio cartels, also operate in the country.
Tackling the problem of drug-related violence, according to experts, is a major challenge for the government because of Mexico’s notoriously corrupt security officials and a poorly equipped police force unable to take on the heavily armed gangs.
Some 40 army and navy personnel, 30 federal police officers and about 200 state law-enforcement agents were killed last year, with most of the killings occurring in northern and southern Mexico, according to official figures.
Since taking office in December 2006, President Felipe Calderon has deployed more than 30,000 soldiers and federal police to nearly a dozen of Mexico’s 31 states in a bid to regain control of territory controlled by the country’s drug cartels.