Mexico Sinaloa ( Six Bodies Found in Northwest Mexico - two of them decapitated ) Drug Wars

Six Bodies Found in Northwest Mexico

CULIACAN, Mexico – Authorities in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa found six bodies Saturday alongside a highway, two of them decapitated, prosecutors said.

The corpses were discovered next to the Mexico City-Nogales highway near the town of Ahome, a spokesman for the Sinaloa state Attorney General’s Office said.

Motorists called police to the grisly scene, leading to an intense operation involving municipal authorities, army soldiers and federal police, who cordoned off the area.

All are believed to have been killed at the scene because more than 20 spent AK-47 shell casings were found there, police said.

None of the dead has yet been identified.

The municipal police chief in Ahome, Jesus Carrasco, said authorities suspect the same criminal group responsible for the April 20 slayings of six farmworkers – discovered inside a van – also was behind this latest multiple homicide.

In a separate violent incident early Saturday in Sinaloa, a group of gunmen killed two men and seriously wounded a 10-year-old boy as they were walking into a small supermarket in the town of Angostura.

Authorities recovered more than 76 spent AK-47 and R-15 shell casings at the crime scene.

A total of 24 people – including two women – have been killed in Sinaloa in the first four days of May, compared with 106 deaths for all of April, according to the state’s AG’s office.

Sinaloa is the birthplace of the first generation of Mexican drug kingpins, including Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, whose estimated fortune of $1 billion qualified him for a spot on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people.

Guzman was captured in Guatemala in 1993 and extradited to Mexico, where he was convicted and sentenced to prison. But the drug lord escaped from a maximum-security prison in 2001 and remains at large.

Since the jailbreak, El Chapo has built his Sinaloa cartel into Mexico’s most powerful criminal organization.

Suspected gangland violence has left 3,045 people dead nationwide thus far in 2013, according to the Reforma newspaper.

A total of 3,810 drug-related murders have been registered since the Dec. 1, 2012, inauguration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has made crime-prevention programs the focal point of his strategy against drug cartels.