Death toll in Mexico's drug war reaches 700 for 2007

AP/VMS:

Federal police have arrested five people who allegedly smuggled drugs, guns and people into the U.S. and laundered money for Mexico’s infamous Gulf cartel, the federal attorney general’s office said today.

Deputy Attorney General Noe Ramirez told a news conference that the five were captured at a nightclub in Reynosa. He described them as one of the cartel’s most important cells.

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President Felipe Calderon has launched a national crackdown on organized crime, sending 24,000 soldiers to areas plagued by drug violence.

Drug gangs are in the midst of a bloody turf battle, and on Monday police found nearly 20 corpses stuffed in cars or dumped on the streets in garbage bags across Mexico. It was not immediately known if all the deaths were linked to drug violence.

In the resort city of Cancun, the bodies of three men and two women were found in an SUV, state police said in a news release. The victims’ heads were covered in tape and their hands bound behind their backs, it said. One of the male victims was dressed in women’s clothes.

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In Mexico City, police found three corpses in an SUV parked in a middle-class neighborhood.

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Another two corpses were found in a car in the city of Iguala, about 100 miles south of the capital. A note in the car threatened Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the alleged head of the Sinaloa Cartel who escaped from a federal prison in 2001.

Three burned bodies were also found in two cars in the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan, while four bodies were found in garbage bags in the central Mexican tourist town of Taxco and the port city of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico.

Federal investigators say the Sinaloa cartel is fighting a bloody turf war with the Gulf Cartel and their army of enforcers known as the Zetas over lucrative drug trafficking routes to the United States.

According to a tally kept by Mexico City daily El Universal, there have been more than 700 drug slayings since January.

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There is war going on south of our border that is as violent as the wars we are fighting in the Middle East. While Calderon is fighting back, the narco thugs are fighting each other. Reynosa is just across the Texas border near McAllen. The arrest there is an important one.