MEXICO CITY (AFP) — Gunmen raided a farm in northwest Mexico this week and abducted 27 workers -- who were still missing Thursday -- in the latest daring attack blamed on Mexico's warring drug cartels.
From beheadings, to injecting a child with acid or gunning down patients in a drug rehabilitation center, this year's list of alleged drug gang-related crimes is long and gruesome.
More than 4,500 people have been killed nationwide in the drug cartel war, according to authorities.
Mexican authorities say much of the violence is due to turf wars between the powerful drug cartels of Ciudad Juarez, on the central US border; Sinaloa, in northwest Mexico where the farmers were abducted; and the Gulf of Mexico in the east.
Authorities on Wednesday took control of the property where the farm workers were kidnapped, claiming its owner was linked to the Juarez cartel.
The owner of the La Guajira farm allegedly has family ties to Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, a drug lord known as "The Viceroy" and a member of the clan that heads the Ciudad Juarez cartel.
Investigators were exploring whether the workers had been abducted to raise illegal crops such as marijuana.
The kidnapping was "a challenge from one cartel to another, like the decapitated corpses found practically every day in Ciudad Juarez," a drug warfare analyst told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
More than 1,300 people have died in the border city across from El Paso, Texas, this year alone, according to local officials.
Border areas are particularly volatile as drug gangs and their offshoots fight for key trafficking routes into the United States, but attacks occur across the country -- including mass beheadings in the tourist area of the Yucatan in southwest Mexico in August -- creating a growing climate of unease.
"I think that there is a general increase in fear," Rene Jimenez Ornelas, a criminology researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), told Mexican radio.
"The drug traffickers want to make us believe that in some regions and municipalities they're the leaders and they don't only control drugs ... they determine police actions."
Mexican police are notoriously corrupt and often suspected of involvement in kidnappings and killings.
The government of President Felipe Calderon has made the fight against drug crime a priority, with the deployment of some 36,000 troops across the country almost two years ago.
Mexican lawmakers late Wednesday approved a 260-billion-dollar budget which included a 30 percent increase in security spending to support the crackdown.
Recent months and weeks have seen some successes, including a few high-profile arrests such as the capture of the head of the Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cardenas, who was extradited to the United States in early 2007.
Authorities last week displayed their largest-ever weapons haul, of 540 weapons, grabbed from suspected members of the Gulf cartel.
But killings and abductions continue.
In a blow to the government crackdown, Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino and another top official in the battle against drug crime died last week in a plane crash, along with 12 others.
Mexican officials have rejected speculation of foul play from drug gangs in the crash into rush hour traffic in Mexico City. The black boxes are now under scrutiny in the United States.
The US ambassador to Mexico, Antonio Garza, said in a statement late Wednesday that so far there was no evidence to suggest sabotage or criminal activity was to blame for the crash.
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