For anyone dreaming of an imminent end to the criminal bloodbath tormenting Mexico, April was perhaps the cruelest month. More than 1,400 gangland killings were clocked, by one newspaper's count, giving April the highest death toll of the 53 months since President Felipe Calderon unleashed the military and federal police against the country's crime syndicates.
The toll includes more than 300 bodies pulled from mass graves near the South Texas border and in other northern Mexican states. Many of the graves' victims were killed weeks, even months earlier.
Still, nearly 40 people a day were slain last month, according to Milenio, the newspaper that tallied the 1,402 deaths. In April's last week alone, gunmen abducted 11 city police officers, including the force's chief, in a Monterrey suburb. And security forces seized an arsenal from a residential basement in Ciudad Juarez, bordering El Paso, that included at least one weapon capable of downing aircraft.
"We're in this mammoth, huge trauma, and everybody is demanding it must be solved," Vicente Fox, Calderon's predecessor, told a luncheon crowd of Houston business and community leaders this week.
"We are indeed in trouble now in Mexico." As the crackdown slogs into a fifth year and the body count ticks toward 40,000, opinion polls suggest a growing legion of Mexicans share Fox's frustration.
Thousands of Mexicans are expected to march Sunday in Mexico City and elsewhere to demand an end to the violence.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7551088.html
