Mexico Morelia ( 8 Lemon pickers were killed along with 11 others ) Cartel wars

MORELIA, Mexico – At least 19 people died in drug-related violence in the western Mexican state of Michoacan and the southern state of Guerrero, officials and community leaders said.

Eight lemon pickers were killed and several others wounded in an attack Wednesday in Apatzingan, a city in Michoacan, by gunmen suspected of being on the payroll of the Los Caballeros Templarios drug gang, community leaders said.

The Caballeros Templarios gang was founded in March 2011 by former members of the La Familia Michoacana cartel and deals in both synthetic drugs and natural drugs.

The cartel has been fighting rival gangs for control of turf and smuggling routes in Guerrero and Michoacan states, both of which are on the Pacific.

Michoacan’s forests and mountains are used by drug traffickers to grow marijuana and produce synthetic drugs.

Federal Police officers were attacked in the same area by gunmen and killed one of the suspected criminals in a shootout, officials said.

An officer was wounded in the incident, which may be related to the attack on the lemon pickers, a police spokesman said.

Five suspected gunmen were killed in a shootout with the Federal Police in Charapando, another community in the Tierra Caliente region.

Officials in Morelia, the capital of Michoacan, had to evacuate a high school after threats were made against an adjacent Federal Police station.

The bodies of four people, meanwhile, were found in Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero state, state judicial officials told Efe.

The war on drugs launched by former President Felipe Calderon, who was in office from 2006 to 2012, left about 70,000 people dead, or an average of 32 per day, in Mexico, officials say.

Calderon, of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, deployed thousands of soldiers and Federal Police officers across the country to fight drug cartels.

President Enrique Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has continued the strategy implemented by Calderon of taking on the cartels, but he has also called for bolstering intelligence capabilities and attacking criminal organizations’ entire structures, not just kingpins. EFE