MEXICO CITY — Gunmen killed 15 people at a carwash Wednesday in a Mexican Pacific coast state where drug-gang violence has risen this year. It was the third massacre in Mexico in less than a week.
The gunmen in three vehicles drove up to the carwash in the city of Tepic and opened fire without provocation, said Fernando Carvajal, public safety secretary of Nayarit state, where the city is located. Fifteen men were killed and three people were injured.
The motive was not immediately clear but investigators suspect it was the work of organized crime, Carvajal said.
He said most of the victims were recovering drug addicts and worked at the carwash. One victim, however, had just driven up to the business ina motorcycle and appeared not to have worked there, and another body was found at a nearby fruit stand.
Carvajal said the owners of the business have another carwash in the city where a man was killed Tuesday, and police were investigating whether the attacks were linked.
Nayarit Gov. Ney Gonzalez said investigators believe some of the victims had been washing a stolen car.
“These boys were fighting for hope, were fighting against drugs,” Gonzalez said in a statement posted by the state government. “The same as in Ciudad Juarez, the same thing in Tijuana,” he said, referring to recent attacks on rehabilitation centers in those cities.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon, speaking at a forum on security, called for a minute of silence for the victims of the Tepic attack and two other massacres that have occurred since Friday: an attack on a birthday party that killed 14 young people in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, and a shooting at a drug-rehab center in Tijuana that killed 13 recovering addicts.
The three attacks did not appear to be related.
In an interview with the BBC released Wednesday, Calderon said he had to launch the offensive in part because his predecessor, Vicente Fox - who served as president from 2000 to 2006 and is a member of Calderon’s conservative National Action Party - “didn’t act in time” to stem the rise of the cartels.
“I have a great respect for former President Fox,” Calderon said. “But I think he made a lot of mistakes on this issue. Perhaps the most important was not acting in time on this.
“I think that if Mexico had started to fight against this problem 10 years ago, we would be talking about something completely different now.”
In Ciudad Juarez, investigators said two men found dead Tuesday - one of them decapitated - might have been involved in the birthday party massacre Friday night. A note left with the bodies accused the men of killing women and children. The victims of the party attack ranged from 13 to 32 years old and included women and girls.
In an unrelated attack, a Chihuahua state police officer was killed Wednesday in his Ciudad Juarez home, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office.
Information for this article was contributed from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, by Olivia Torres of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 10/28/2010