The new killing fields as cartels tighten grip in drugs war

A car explodes outside a police station, another outside a television station.

A drug gang is suspected of massacring 72 migrants and a prosecutor investigating those deaths suddenly disappears. Mexico’s drug cartels seem to be adopting the tactics of war zones half a world away.

The violence has contributed to fewer migrants crossing the border into America, officials say, because they have to traverse some of Mexico’s most dangerous territory to get to Texas. Mexican officials, meanwhile, warn there will likely be more bloodshed in the coming months.

“Violence will persist and even intensify,” said President Felipe Calderon at a forum on security, where he promised he would not back down.

The two car explosions happened early on Friday, less than 45 minutes apart, in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of the northern state of Tamaulipas, near where the slaughtered migrants were found.

The first happened in front of the offices of the Televisa network and the second in front of transit police offices. The network described the explosion as a car bomb, but the state attorney general’s office could not confirm that.

If the explosions were car bombs, it would mean a total of four so far this year in Mexico – a new and frightening tactic that officials say the cartels are using in the escalating drug war.