News

Mexico City –  About 40 gunmen attacked the mayor of Garcia, a city in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, killing a bodyguard, wounding four others but failing to kill the municipal official.

Mayor Jaime Rodriguez survived the attack, which was the second attempt to kill him in just over a month.

Rodriguez described the attack in an interview with a television station in Nuevo Leon, a crime-ridden state located on the border with the United States.

Gunmen traveling in several vehicles opened fire on the SUV that was carrying eight bodyguards, Rodriguez said.

The gunmen were apparently trying to neutralize the bodyguards so they could kill the mayor, who was in an armored SUV.

The mayor's vehicle was hit by gunfire, but none of the rounds penetrated the armor.

The attack occurred Tuesday night on Abraham Lincoln avenue in Garcia, a city in the Monterrey metropolitan area.

The mayor's bodyguards killed three gunmen who tried to kill him on Feb. 25.

Rodriguez, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, said the attack may have been ordered by Los Zetas, a drug cartel that operates in northeastern Mexico.

Nuevo Leon and neighboring Tamaulipas state have been rocked by a wave of violence unleashed by drug traffickers battling for control of smuggling routes into the United States.

The violence has intensified in the two border states since the appearance in Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo Leon, in February 2010 of giant banners heralding an alliance of the Gulf, Sinaloa and La Familia drug cartels against Los Zetas.

Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, known as "El Lazca," deserted from the Mexican army in 1999 and formed Los Zetas with three other soldiers, all members of an elite special operations unit, becoming the armed wing of the Gulf drug cartel.

After several years on the payroll of the Gulf cartel, Los Zetas went into the drug business on their own account and now control several lucrative territories.

The cartels arrayed against Los Zetas blame the group's involvement in kidnappings, armed robbery and extortion for discrediting "true drug traffickers" in the eyes of ordinary Mexicans willing to tolerate the illicit trade as long as the gangs stuck to their own unwritten rule against harming innocents.

A total of 15,270 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico last year, and more than 35,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the country's cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006.

Calderon has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers and Federal Police officers across the country to combat drug cartels and other criminal organizations.

The anti-drug operation, however, has failed to put a dent in the violence due, according to experts, to drug cartels' ability to buy off the police and even high-ranking officials.