Three state police officers and four suspected drug dealers were killed in a series of shootings in northern Mexico on the border of Tamaulipas, just across the Texas border, officials said Wednesday.
Five other police officers were injured in a series of clashes on highways around the city of San Fernando, Tamaulipas.
Gunmen belonging to drug gangs blocked the roads and attacked the police who were patrolling the area on Tuesday, and later in the day they also attacked the funeral procession of the vehicles that accompanied the body of one of those who died in the first incident.
The state security spokesman’s office confirmed the death of the officers on Wednesday, but there was no immediate information on the condition of the injured officers.
San Fernando is an intermediate city between the country’s capital, Ciudad Victoria, and the border towns of Matamoros and Reynosa.
San Fernando was the scene of the most brutal violence of the drug war in Mexico between 2010 and 2011. During those years, gunmen killed 72 migrants, many of them from Central America, and killed about 122 bus passengers. Those who died were taken out of passing buses and forced to fight each other and killed with hammers.
Tamaulipas has long been ruled by the Gulf cartel and the old Zetas cartel, now known as the Cartel del Noreste.
Also on Wednesday, cartel suspects in another border state, Sonora, killed an investigator and injured two others in an incident on Wednesday that also involved the suspects raiding a police vehicle.
The confrontation happened early Wednesday on a road leading to the border town of Sasabe, west of Nogales, Arizona. A Mexican sailor was also injured in the attack. All the injured are listed in stable condition.
Authorities were chasing an SUV that was driving with its lights off on a rural road when the suspects first raided detectives’ vehicles and then followed a Mexican military unit before opening fire. The marines and detectives returned fire and three suspects were killed.
The area is a hotbed of immigration and drug trafficking.
The shooting comes on the heels of other recent deadly incidents near the U.S.-Mexico border. Earlier this month, the Mexican National Guard died he shot two Colombians and four others were injured in what the Department of Defense said was a skirmish along the American border.
In October, the gunmen apparently worked for a drug cartel killed a US Marine veteran bordering the state of Sonora
And last month, human rights activists and relatives in the violent Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas, blamed the military and National Guard soldiers. a nurse and an 8-year-old girl died. Nuevo Laredo has long been ruled by the brutal Northeast Cartel, an offshoot of the old Zetas cartel.
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