State Dept. Warning: Americans Should Not Go to Mexico (Graphic)

A Travel Warning is issued, according to the State Department, to describe long-term, protracted conditions that make a country dangerous or unstable.” Travel Warnings also are issued when the U.S. government is limited in protecting citizens because of closures or staff reductions at its consulates.

Guerrero state, which includes Acapulco, is one of Mexico’s most violent jurisdictions, the Times reported. 

Local news channels have been trying to give a sense of normality to the situation, showing young U.S., Canadian and European tourists already enjoying themselves on Acapulco’s beaches, the Times said. A holiday has made a three-day weekend for Mexicans. 

But Heriberto Salinas Altes, head of public security in Guerrero said an increase in violence was expected because of new power struggles among drug gangs. 

The Times said more than 18,000 have been killed since President Felipe Calderon sent in the army to fight the cartels in December 2006.  

The number of U.S. citizens killed in Mexico has more than doubled to 79 in 2009 from 35 in 2007, according to the U.S. State Department’s annual count. No figures were available for the first two months of 2010.

Tania Lozoya, 15, of El Paso, Texas, was killed by a stray bullet at her aunt’s house across the border in Ciudad Juarez in May 2009, after gunfire broke out when two men chased another man into the backyard of the residence.

 

In December, a California assistant school principal, Augustin Salcedo, was killed after he was abducted from a restaurant along with five other men while he and his wife were visiting her hometown of Gomez Palacio, in the northern state of Durango. The motive for the mass abduction remains unclear.

 

Other Americans appear to have been specifically targeted.

U.S. anti-kidnapping expert Felix Batista was abducted by gunmen in December 2008 in the northern city of Saltillo, where he had gone to advise local businessmen on how to avoid becoming victims of the country’s wave of kidnappings. He has not been found. 

In Acapulco on the Pacific Coast, two nephews of the city’s deputy transit director were found dismembered and beheaded on March 22. A sign near the bodies said it was vengeance against those who supported drug lord Hector Beltran Leyva, a bitter rival of La Barbie.

  

On a rural highway north of Monterrey, the beheaded bodies of a rural police chief and his brother were found in a Chevrolet pickup truck March 26. Assailants used the blood from the victims to scrawl “CDG,” the Spanish initials for the Gulf Cartel, on the windshield and the driver’s door.  The Gulf Cartel, based in Tamaulipas state, is locked in a bloody feud with a group that once provided muscle to its leaders. The armed wing, known as Los Zetas, struck out on its own in 2008, and the killings between the two have continued nonstop.

  

In Apatzingan, a city of 100,000 people in Michoacan state, four heads were left in a row next to a statue to Lazaro Cardenas, a former president, on March 31. A sign said it was vengeance by enforcers of the brutal criminal drug gang known as La Familia against Los Zetas, and suggested that a Zetas chief known as “Rufo,” should search for an Internet video to see how the beheadings were carried out. (A video was posted on the Web, but YouTube removed it, citing a “terms of use violation.”)

 

National print media in Mexico now downplay the beheadings, giving them scant paragraphs and limiting the publicity the cartels once received. 

 

13 Murdered, Some Beheaded, In Acapulco  

You are 34 times more likely to be murdered or assaulted in Mexico than you are in the United States. Nearly twice as likely to be murdered or assaulted in Mexico than in Cuba and nearly three times more likely to have that happen in Mexico than in the Dominican Republic.

 

 

 

The Mexican newspapers that keep running tallies of drug-related violence reported last week that a record was set when 85 people died in a 24-hour period, topping the previous record from November 2008, when 58 were killed over a similar period.

 

But the pace of killing quickened. On Monday, El Universal newspaper reported that 96 people in seven states died, and another record was set.

 

The attacks began Thursday when two dozen gunmen stormed into the Faith and Life drug rehabilitation center in the northern state of Chihuahua, forced the patients onto the floor or against the wall and killed 19 of them. The dead ranged in age from 16 to 63.

 

……. 

 

On Monday, gunmen killed 15 federal police officers in separate attacks in two states known for heavy narcotics trafficking. In the mountainous state of Michoacan, west of Mexico City, mafia assassins used burning buses to block a major highway and ambush a convoy of police returning to the capital, killing 12 officers and wounding at least eight others.

 

Also Monday, 29 prisoners from rival gangs attacked one another with pistols, an assault rifle and knives in the Mazatlan jail in the western state of Sinaloa, home to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The billionaire cartel boss, whom Forbes magazine has named one of the richest men in Mexico, is among the most wanted fugitives there and in the United States.

 

Prison officials said that 18 inmates were killed in initial assaults and that 11 others died of stab wounds and beatings when fighting spread to other cell blocks.

 

In Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, seven or eight people are killed in drug-related violence every day, often garnering only a few paragraphs in the local newspapers. Almost 1,200 people have died in Juarez this year.

“The origin of our violence problem begins with the fact that Mexico is located next to the country that has the highest levels of drug consumption in the world,” Calderón wrote. “It is as if our neighbor were the biggest drug addict in the world.”