15 Die in Sinaloa Attacks on Eve of Bush Visit to Mexico

LEON, Mexico —  A gang of hooded men in green uniforms gunned down 12 people, including two 13-year-olds, in a mountain village in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, officials said Thursday.

Three other people were slain in another incident in the violence-plagued state Thursday morning, state Atty. Gen. Ramon de Jesus Castro said.

The deaths brought to 67 the number of people killed in the western state in just the first six weeks of the year, a police spokeswoman said. Many of those killings have involved drug traffickers settling scores and battling for territory.

The latest violence came on the eve of President Vicente Fox’s meeting with President Bush at Fox’s ranch near the city of Leon in the central state of Guanajuato. The brutality in Sinaloa underscores the challenge Fox faces in fulfilling his pledge to end lawlessness in Mexico.

Castro told reporters in Sinaloa that investigators could not yet identify a motive for the massacre Wednesday in the community of El Limoncito, about 70 miles southeast of the state capital, Culiacan.

A similar mass killing of 18 people near Ensenada in Baja California in September 1998 was sparked by a squabble between marijuana traffickers. Remote communities, however, also are plagued by personal rivalries and fights over land and resources.

Castro said a gang of about 15 men, armed with AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles, descended from the mountains in two groups and burst into the house of village leader Valentin Beltran Arechiga as he was hosting a party.

The attackers asked those present, one by one, the whereabouts of a person whom Castro declined to identify. When the party-goers refused to answer, they were forced from the house and pushed aboard a four-wheel-drive truck, where they were shot to death. Beltran was among those killed. One person was shot to death trying to escape, the attorney general added, and three people were wounded.

Officials found 96 spent shells at the scene. More than 200 police officers were combing the surrounding mountains for the killers.

Castro said that investigations turned up evidence that appeared to identify two of the gang members and that they were being sought.

Sinaloa has long been besieged by violence, much of it related to organized-crime syndicates trafficking in illegal drugs.

Fox, who took office Dec. 1, pointedly came to Sinaloa in January to launch his anti-crime campaign.

The difficulties Fox faces were made starkly clear when a reputed drug lord from Sinaloa, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, escaped from a maximum-security prison last month in Guadalajara.

Mexico City also has seen a spurt of homicides in recent weeks, some apparently related to organized crime and drug trafficking and others the result of street crime.