Mexico City sees drug war-style violence descend upon capital

MEXICO CITY — Burned-out vehicles. Road blockades. A raging gun battle between armored marines and gang members that left eight dead.

Such scenes have been common in border cities like Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, and figures released Friday show the death toll from Mexico’s drug war has reached new heights this year. But residents of the capital were stunned this week to see that kind of mayhem in their own city.

Thursday’s shootout, along with the recent emergence in a workingclass neighborhood of an apparent group of “vigilantes” — styled after self-defense militias that rose up against a drug cartel in the western state of Michoacan — have left authorities scrambling to maintain their long-held claims that drug cartels don’t operate in Mexico City.

Thursday’s shootout saw some 1,300 police and marines deployed on the streets of Tlahuac, a poor borough on the southeastern outskirts that was a rural area until a few years ago. Photos from the scene showed the slain suspects were carrying assault rifles instead of the pistols usually used in most armed crimes in Mexico City.

Perhaps most shocking was the appearance of organized roadblocks put up by gang members or sympathizers to impede the movements of police. City officials said gang members hijacked about five buses or trucks, and video images showed teams of motorcyclists parking their vehicles to shut down an expressway and then setting fire to a bus.

“The narco-blockades come to Mexico City,” the newspaper El Universal wrote in a front-page headline Friday.

The nation’s capital once looked on the drug war as a battle fought in outlying states. Not anymore. The capital’s murder rate went up by 21 percent in the first six months of this year, according to the newly released statistics.

Those show homicides over the first half of the year increased 31 percent over the same period last year, in the worst bout of such violence in 20 years.