10 Students Gunned Down in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (March 30) -- As Mexico closed down for its annual celebration of Holy Week, officials reacted with anger and a degree of helplessness to the slayings of 10 students from a tiny mountainside hamlet who were mowed down by an armed commando on Palm Sunday. The victims, ages 8 to 21, were killed while driving down a desolate highway in the north-central Mexican state of Durango.

According to authorities, the group's pickup was waved to a stop at an improvised roadblock by a man in military garb. Then he and an unknown number of other attackers tossed hand grenades at the truck and riddled it with bullets.

Two women who survived the attack were ordered by the killers to walk a little more than four miles to the nearest town to notify the military about what had happened, the daily La Jornada reported.

Durango Gov. Ismael Hernandez Deras told Mexico City newspaper La Prensa that the authorities believe the assassins were connected to the drug cartels who are fighting for control of the region, known as Mexico's "golden triangle" because of the amount of marijuana, opium and heroin produced there.

"This bloody fight ... is about the entrance of new elements of organized crime and the pulverization of pre-existing groups," Hernandez Deras said.

But the state's attorney general, Daniel Garcia Leal, told a Mexico radio show today that violence could have another background, such as a family spat or an act of vengeance.

He said, however, that the place where the crime was committed is "where groups of organized criminals dedicated to moving drugs and goods meet, and also where people carry out purchasing operations."

Violence is ratcheting up across Mexico, and the drug trade is widely blamed. A slew of brutal attacks in recent weeks -- including the slaying of two Americans in the border city of Ciudad Juarez -- is worrying tourists, foreign investors and the U.S. government, which sent a high-level delegation to Mexico City last week.

The sparsely populated western Sierra Madre mountains of Durango have become a crucial gateway for traffickers fighting for control of lucrative drug routes. When they were killed, the students were on their way to Los Naranjos, a small village in the municipality of Puerto Nuevo, in the southeastern part of the state. The village borders the states of Nayarit, Jalisco and Sinaloa, the birthplace of many of Mexico's most notorious capos. "The towns are isolated; entire families have left because of the harassment of hit men, soldiers and police officers," according to an editorial in today's La Voz de Durango newspaper. "It's a no man's land, a dance with death, an infernal, harsh and bloody land."

Only 25 percent of working-age residents in the region of Durango are economically active, according to government statistics. Those who do work have few legitimate options besides the lumber industry, ranching and agriculture.

The victims, five girls and five boys from three families, were among some 74,000 households in the region benefiting from a federal program that aids low-income families for keeping their children in school and practicing good hygiene.

Mexico's secretary of the interior, Fernando Gomez-Mont, emphasized his will for the "most energetic repudiation of this brutal act" at a press conference in Mexico City on Monday. Though the motive remained unknown, Gomez-Mont noted that the Sinaloa drug gang had been waging a war in the region with the Zetas, former commandos and assassins who have splintered off from the Gulf cartel to form their own drug-trafficking organization.

Since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006, more than 18,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence. The government says some 90 percent of victims are cartel members killed by rival drug gangs, and that the rest of the victims are mostly police and army officials. It says very few innocent civilians have been killed.

But it is not just the Palm Sunday slayings that challenge that assertion. A week ago, two engineering students at Mexico's prestigious Monterrey Institute of Technology were caught in the crossfire. In January, bullets rained on a high school party in Ciudad Juarez, killing 15 teenagers. And in late December a 33-year-old school board official from El Monte, Calif., was executed after being kidnapped along with five other men from a restaurant in his wife's hometown in Durango.