Red on red fighting kills 14 drug thugs near Tijuana

Reuters:

Fourteen Mexican drug gang members were killed and eight others were injured in a gun battle near the U.S. border on Saturday, one of the bloodiest shootouts in Mexico's three-year-long narco-war.

Rival factions of the local Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border fought each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said.

The bodies lay in pools of blood, strewn along a road on the city's eastern limits, surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings. Many of the victims' faces were destroyed.

"By the way this happened and the guns used, we believe the men are from the same cartel, the Arellano Felix gang," said a senior police officer in Tijuana who declined to be named.

Two men were arrested but the remaining survivors escaped, the officer said.

The Arellano Felix gang was long the dominant drug-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.

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Having the gangs give each other the death penalty is probably a bonus for the Mexican government's counterinsurgency operations against them. While it is bad PR for the tourist trade, Tijuana's drug insurgents have already driven most of the easily frightened away. Some in these gangs have resorted to supplementing their drug money with kidnapping, which makes most people hesitate before getting in a Tijuana taxi.