A suspected car bomb exploded outside a major TV station in northeast Mexico yesterday where officials were probing the massacre of 72 migrants, while two police officials were missing in the area.
The overnight blast outside Televisa in Ciudad Victoria, capital of violence-plagued Tamaulipas state, left no victims but briefly caused the local channel to be cut off from the network, according to station officials. Authorities yesterday probed the disappearance of two police officers in the area where drug gangs have spread a climate of fear.
An investigator and a transport police officer disappeared on Thursday, a spokesman from the local justice office said, declining to be named.
The spokesman did not say whether they had been working on the investigation into the massacre, but said they were not dealing with the identification of bodies.
Diplomats from Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador and Brazil yesterday joined efforts to identify 72 bodies found in a pile with their hands tied and blindfolded inside a warehouse on a ranch in the town of San Fernando.
“The barbarity committed in the murder of 72 people, migrants, in our country, shows the level of violence and barbarity with which the criminals are acting,” Mexican President Felipe Calderon said at a security forum yesterday.
Fifteen bodies had been identified late Thursday, said an official from the state attorney general’s office, including four Salvadorans and a Brazilian.
At least two Guatemalans were among the dead, the foreign ministry said in Guatemala City.
Officials struggled to identify many of the 58 men and 14 women because they did not carry documents.
The gruesome massacre spotlighted the horrific risks taken by hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking to reach the United States each year.
An estimated 400,000 migrants transit through Mexico every year, most of them victims of trafficking by gangs, according to UN human rights chief Navi Pillay.
She condemned the killings yesterday, saying they underlined the “critical situation” of migrants in Mexico.
“Ensuring that there is no impunity is crucial to avoid a repetition of such a heinous crime,” Ms Pillay said.
Mr Calderon has blamed the deaths on a power struggle between the Gulf gang and the Zetas, their former allies, but officials have not given further information on the probe.
An injured Ecuadoran man claiming to be the massacre’s sole survivor alerted the military to the ranch, where he said the group had been kidnapped and killed by Zetas drug gang members for refusing to work for them.
Mexican marines discovered the corpses after clashing with suspected drug gang members near the town of San Fernando late Tuesday.
They captured an “underage suspect” at the ranch, but the rest of the surviving gunmen escaped.
Military checkpoints were stopping vehicles in the area for any leads on the killings, an army spokesman said.
The presidency said drug gangs increasingly used extortion and kidnapping of migrants for financing and recruitment because they were having problems under a controversial government clampdown on organized crime.
Critics say the growing activities prove the power of the gangs.
Violence has erupted across the country, with more than 28,000 killed since Mr Calderon deployed tens of thousands of soldiers to take on the country’s powerful drug gangs in 2006.
If yesterday’s explosion is confirmed to be a car bomb by authorities, it marks a frightening new trend in the country’s escalating drug battles.
A first car bomb exploded on July 5 in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, leaving several dead.
Televisa, Mexico’s most watched TV network, has had affiliates attacked at least twice this year, most recently in the northern city of Monterrey two weeks ago.