CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Gunmen killed 25 people in a series of drug-gang attacks in Ciudad Juarez, marking the deadliest day in more than two years for the Mexican border city. Farther east on the border, 85 inmates scaled the walls of a prison and escaped Friday.
Despite the violence, President Felipe Calderon hotly disputed a statement this week by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Mexico resembled Colombia two decades ago.
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“These kind of comments like the ones made by Secretary of State Clinton so careless, so lacking in seriousness, are very painful for Mexico, because they damage Mexico’s image terribly,” Calderon told the Spanish-language network Univision.
“I think the main thing we have in common with Colombia is that both of our countries suffer from U.S. drug consumption,” Calderon said. “We are both victims of the enormous American consumption of drugs, and now the sales of weapons.”
The toll in Thursday’s attacks in Ciudad Juarez included 15 people killed when attackers stormed four homes in three hours, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located.
In the worst of those attacks, gunmen burst into a house and killed two young men, then killed four others for being witnesses.
In Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, 85 inmates — 66 of whom were convicted or are on trial for federal charges like weapons possession or drugs — scaled the city prison’s 20-foot walls using ladders, said the Tamaulipas state public safety secretary, Jose Garza Garcia.
Garza Garcia said 44 prison guards and employees were under investigation.
“The guards evidently helped in the escape,” he said.
Ciudad Juarez, with a population of 1.3 million, has become one of the world’s most dangerous cities amid a turf war between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels. More than 2,100 people have been killed in the city this year.
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