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26 executed in drug warfare

Published:Friday | November 25, 2011 | 12:00 AM
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Egyptian Army officers ask protesters to leave the top of a concrete block barricade on the street between Tahrir Square and the interior ministry in Cairo, Egypt.AP photos
Protesters gather as Egyptian Army soldiers build a concrete block barricade on the street between Tahrir Square and the interior ministry in Cairo, Egypt, yesterday.
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GUADALAJARA (AP):

The bound and gagged bodies of 26 men were found dumped before dawn yesterday in the heart of the picturesque city of Guadalajara, a sign that full-scale war between drug cartels may have come to the metropolis that hosted last month's Pan American Games.

Law-enforcement officials said the men were found, shot execution-style, in two vans and a pickup truck abandoned near the Millennium Arches, one of the most recognisable landmarks in Mexico's second-largest city.

Best known as the home of mariachi music and tequila, Guadalajara also sits on the main highway running through western Mexico from the methamphetamine-producing state of Michoacan north towards the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa. In recent months, security officials and analysts have worried that the city could become a target for the Zetas drug cartel, which has been using paramilitary-style tactics and headline-grabbing atrocities in a national push to grab territory from older organised crime groups.

"These acts of barbarism show how the war between cartels, and crime, is getting more brutal," Guadalajara's mayor, Jorge Aristoteles Sandoval, told reporters.