Tijuana Mexico

Heavily armed men killed three senior police officers and six other people here hours after a foiled armored car robbery, the latest attacks apparently triggered by a crackdown on police corruption and organized crime. Since Dec. 1, when Mayor Jorge Ramos took office promising to battle drug cartels, five officers, including three deputy chiefs, have been fatally shot gangland-style.

Hundreds of police officers and soldiers waged a three-hour gun battle against heavily armed men here Thursday, as residents of a normally quiet neighborhood ran for their lives. One suspect was killed and six kidnapping victims were found dead after the shootout. Four police officers were injured as a monthlong crackdown on Tijuana's crime cartels escalated. The working-class neighborhood of La Mesa resembled a war zone.

The bullet holes pockmarking the walls of his home were just three days old when Alberto Capella Ibarra took over the police force of this violence-plagued city. Twenty gunmen dressed in black had swarmed his yard in the middle of the night, and he'd fought them off, firing an automatic rifle. Taking office Dec. 1 as the city's secretary for public security, Capella, a longtime activist, declared war on organized crime and challenged citizens to join him in the battle.

On Sunday, following one of the bloodiest days in Tijuana's history, authorities held no news conferences. The death toll in the gangland-style shootings early Saturday between rival drug traffickers increased to 15 from 13, after two men died of their injuries. But not even the names of the dead were released. Instead, speculation, rumor and scattered news leaks filled the information vacuum after yet another battle in Mexico's drug wars.

Ten people were killed between Saturday and Monday, including two young women and a police officer, as the Tijuana area suffered its worst bout of violence since an April shootout that killed 13 gunmen, Baja California authorities said. Most of the seven incidents did not appear directly related to the Mexican government's offensive against organized crime, which has claimed more than 170 lives this year in Tijuana. The two women's deaths were the exception.

Police discovered the tortured and burned bodies of six men in an empty lot Monday morning, ending a period of relative calm in this border city beset by drug war violence. Eleven bodies have been discovered since Saturday in violence believed to be drug-related, including the corpse of a woman found in a barrel, state and federal authorities said.

Leonor Merino said she was shocked enough Monday to find that what she thought was a pile of rags was a dozen bodies. Then she realized children soon would be passing by the carnage on the way to school. So as class time approached at Valentin Gomez Farias elementary school, Merino and her neighbors blocked the streets. "We closed the streets so the kids wouldn't see all the dead bodies," Merino said hours after the bodies were removed. "Our hearts are trembling right now.

Overnight violence left eight people dead in this Mexican border city, officials said Tuesday. The state prosecutor's office said three teenagers, including a 14-year-old girl, were gunned down in the street; a few blocks away, officials found the bullet-riddled body of a man. In another part of the city, gunmen opened fire on a car, killing two men. Assailants attacked another car before dawn Tuesday, injuring a police officer and killing a relative.

Two former U.S. Border Patrol agents who fled the country while under investigation for alleged immigrant smuggling have been arrested in Tijuana after a two-year manhunt, federal authorities announced Monday. The suspects, brothers Raul and Fidel Villarreal, were being investigated on suspicion of smuggling illegal immigrants in their government vehicles when they abruptly resigned and disappeared in June 2006.

The schoolchildren bounded up the rickety steps and followed the path of shattered glass into the two-story house on Laguna Salada Street. Two boys in neatly pressed gray pants flipped open their cellphones and took pictures of the pools of sticky blood. One teenager with a blue backpack pounced on a mangled bullet lying near a stained mattress. In the living room, someone slipped on a pile of human entrails.