Pictured: Investigators inspect what remains of a vehicle that exploded outside the Televisa network in the northern city of Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, Friday Aug. 27.
Three days after 72 migrants were found dead on a ranch near the Texas border, a local prosecutor involved in the investigation was reported missing on Friday and the office of a national television network in the region was damaged by an explosion, the authorities said.
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The acts pointed to the worsening violence in northeastern Mexico as drug gangs battle one another and federal forces in a region crisscrossed by drug-trafficking and human-smuggling routes to the United States.
In addition, the State Department on Friday ordered the children of United States diplomats in Monterrey, an industrial and business hub, to leave the country after a surge in killings, shootings and kidnappings in the city. One shootout occurred last week outside a private school popular with Americans and Mexican executives, who took out newspaper advertisements last week urging the government to step up security in Monterrey.
Friday began with two explosions in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas, the state where the bodies of the migrants were found dead this week. The explosions appeared to come from improvised devices that had been placed in or near cars.
No injuries were reported, but Televisa, a leading network, reported that one of the blasts occurred outside its regional office, knocking the network off the air for several hours. The other was in front of a transit police office.
"Now it wasn't bullets, it wasn't grenades, it was a car bomb," Carlos Loret de Mora, the morning anchor for Televisa, said in a Twitter message. Later, several Mexican newspapers reported that a state prosecutor, Roberto Jaime Suárez, had been found dead along with an unidentified person in a car on a highway leading to the town where the migrants' bodies had been found.
By midafternoon, President Felipe Calderón said that while Mr. Suárez was missing, there was no indication that he had died. Mr. Suárez was involved in the initial investigation of the killings, but federal prosecutors have since taken over the inquiry.
"In the short run, it has to be admitted that it is expected the violence will continue and even intensify," Mr. Calderón said. "Afterward, it will tend to reduce the recruitment, growth and force of the criminal organizations."
Consular officials from Ecuador, Brazil, Honduras and El Salvador, the
countries it is believed the migrants were from, worked with Mexican
pathologists to identify the dead.
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Source: Randald C. Archibald, The New York Times
