Mexico: Shooting at a Rehabilitation Center

Police vehicles surround a Mexican drug rehabilitation centre after gunmen kill 17 patients. The hooded attackers lined up their victims in a corridor and shot them. This woman’s relatives were among the dead. [Unidentified Family Member]: “No one was saved, they killed everyone. He was here because he was an addict; the two of them were addicts. We put them in there to see if they would get better.” The northern border town Ciudad Juarez is at the heart of Mexico’s drug war. 10000 troops have been drafted in to keep law and order. But vicious tit for tat killings among rival drugs gangs continue unabated. 13000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 — 4000 of them this year alone. Troops have managed to disrupt some cocaine supplies to the United States. But the top drugs barons remain at large. Mexico’s leader Felipe Calderon has staked his Presidency on crushing the cartels. But he clearly has much work to do. As police removed the victims of the rehab shootings, an investigation also began into the shotgun death of a deputy police chief in Calderon’s home state.

Felipe Calderon, the president of Mexico, has condemned the latest killings linked to the country’s drugs war. The bodies of 18 men and two women were found in different areas of Ciudad Madero. Many were riddled with bullets and were gagged and handcuffed. In a separate attack 350km north, armed men shot dead 19 people at a drug rehabilitation centre in Chihuahua. Al Jazeera’s Mariana Sanchez reports on a city seeing a surge in drug-related killings. June 12, 2010
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