Mexico drug war explosion sees 11,155 people murdered in just five months as rival gangs wage bloody battles over El Chapo’s crumbling empire
AN explosion of violence in Mexico’s drug war has seen 11,155 people murdered in just five months as rival gangs wage bloody battles over El Chapo’s crumbling empire.
The shocking rise has seen one person every 20 minutes killed in the country between January and May this year.
The alarming figures released by the government reveal a 31 per cent jump on the previous year, the reports.
President Enrique Pena Nieto came to office in 2012 vowing to end years of drug violence.
But despite an initial drop in the murder rate, it has been rising steadily since and is now on track to hit its highest level since recent government records began in 1997.
Earl Anthony Wayne, who served as US ambassador to Mexico from 2011 to 2015, said: “The momentum of reducing violence in recent years has clearly broken down.”
By the end of 2017, the death toll could well top 2011’s record 27,213 homicides to become the worst in Mexico’s peacetime history.
Murders have been particularly high in the gang-plagued north-western state of Sinaloa – heartland of captured kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
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Mexican authorities said Saturday that at least 19 people died in clashes involving armed men and security forces.
The violence began with a shooting Friday that killed two men near a department store in the town of Villa Union, about 15 miles south-east of the beach resort of Mazatlan.
Genaro Robles Casillas, the Sinaloa state public security secretary, said: "We believe it has to do with the transport of drugs and the fight for terrain, for the areas that these groups are fighting over."
Sinaloa is the birthplace of a number of Mexico's drug gang leaders, and killings have risen there after Guzman was captured and extradited to the US earlier this year to face drug charges.
Security experts say a power struggle has since broken out between opposing factions of the Sinaloa cartel, which also faces challenges from other gangs such as the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
During the first five months of the year, homicides jumped by 76 percent in Sinaloa state compared with the same period in 2016, according to government crime statistics.
The killings include the May 15 slaying of Javier Valdez, an award-winning reporter who specialized in covering drug trafficking and organised crime, in the state capital, Culiacan.
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