Pat Dollard

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Reuters:

The bodies of 35 people with suspected links to organized crime were dumped on a road in eastern Mexico on Tuesday in a major escalation of violence in the once-quiet port city of Veracruz.

The bodies were piled into two trucks abandoned under a highway bridge in Boca del Rio, about 3 miles (5 km) from the city centre, horrifying passers-by on the busy thoroughfare.

Photos circulated on social media networks showed bodies heaped up in the back of the trucks and lying on the tarmac. “Keep away … hooded men unloaded bodies from trucks, slow traffic, danger zone,” one Twitter user warned.

Local media reported some of the corpses, of both men and women, had their hands bound and showed signs of torture, and authorities said they were believed to be members of a criminal gang.

“These were people involved in organized crime,” state prosecutor Reynaldo Escobar told the Milenio television station. All seven people whose bodies were identified in the hours after the dumping had criminal records, he added.

Violence between rival drug cartels has been heating up in the coffee- and sugar-growing state of Veracruz and daily newspaper Milenio said the dead were members of the feared Zetas crime gang, the target of several recent official round-ups in the region.

About 42,000 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderon launched a campaign against drug cartels in late 2006. Most of the violence has been focussed on the northern border with the United States, but has started encroaching on other parts of the country as some gangs fracture and old alliances dissolve.