40 corpses thought to be latest victims of drug war

Suspected drug gang killers have dumped the mutilated bodies of more than 40 people on a highway near the northern city of Monterrey in one of the worst atrocities to hit Mexico in recent years.

The mutilated corpses were found stuffed into bags in the early hours yesterday on a highway in the municipality of Cadereyta Jimenez, officials from the state of Nuevo Leon said.

There were more than 40 victims, an official for the state government said, speaking on condition of anonymity. A state police official said the death toll may have been as high as 49.

It was not immediately clear who the victims were. A forensic investigator at the scene said some of the bodies showed signs of decay, indicating that they may have been dead for days. Officials said the fact they were found with their heads, hands and feet cut off will make identification difficult.

It was the latest in a string of mass slayings that have convulsed Mexico over the past few months, many of them concentrated in the north of the country, where the brutal Zetas drug gang has waged a bloody war for control of smuggling routes.

President Felipe Calderon staked his reputation on bringing Mexico’s drug gangs to heel, sending in the army to fight them shortly after taking office in December 2006.

Since then, however, the violence has spiralled, and more than 50,000 people have fallen victim to the conflict.

The violence has eroded support for Mr Calderon’s conservative National Action Party (PAN), which looks likely to lose power when Mexico elects a new president on 1 July.

Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene said a banner left at the site left a threatening message in the name of the Zetas.

The Zetas have been locked in a bloody conflict with other gangs, including the Gulf cartel. Last Wednesday, 18 people who were found decapitated and dismembered near Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara.

A week earlier, the bodies of nine people were found hanging from a bridge and 14 others found dismembered in the city of Nuevo Laredo, just across the US border from Laredo in Texas. Officials last year found 183 bodies in mass graves in the Tamaulipas state town of San Fernando. They were believed to have been migrants killed by the Zetas. Another 72 migrants, many of them from Central America, were found slain in San Fernando in 2010.