Just when one thinks the violence in Mexico could not be any more shocking, one reads that in Ciudad Juárez gunmen opened fire on six children playing in the yard of a home, killing three girls aged 12, 14 and 15, state authorities said Thursday.?

The Americano

Just when one thinks the violence in Mexico could not be any more shocking, one reads that in Ciudad Juárez gunmen opened fire on six children playing in the yard of a home, killing three girls aged 12, 14 and 15, state authorities said Thursday.

The Chihuahua state prosecutors’ office said three other children in the yard were not hit by the bullets in the attack Wednesday. Some were as young as 8. Ciudad Juárez is the largest city in northern Chihuahua, and is directly across the border from El Paso, Texas.

It is also the most violent city in Mexico. According to the Associated Press, it has been the scene of bloody cartel turf battles that have killed more than 6,000 people the past two years. The story added that in several instances, youths have been killed just because they were in the same home as the gunmen’s intended targets.

A statement from the state prosecutors’ office said that the gunmen in Wednesday’s attack were apparently targeting the father of two of the dead girls in a dispute that may have involved a low-level drug deal.

Two of the dead girls were sisters, and the third victim was their friend.

Mexico’s human rights commission said it had launched an investigation into the shootings.

These were not the only teenagers shot in Ciudad Juárez Thursday. Three other youths, whose ages ranged from 13 to 15, were wounded in a shooting attack on a vehicle. Three adults in the same vehicle were killed in that attack.

While violence has been most prevalent in Ciudad Juárez it is now evident with increasing regularity in other parts of the country.

In its story the AP reported that also on Thursday, gunmen killed the head of a state police agency that prosecutes car thieves in the western state of Jalisco. The Jalisco attorney general’s office said Jesus Quirarte Ruvalcaba and his wife, Maria Guadalupe Aldrete Rosales, were killed in the city of Zapopan, just north of the state capital of Guadalajara.

Violence has spread in Jalisco recently as rival gangs battle for control of the city, in much the same way as they have been doing for more than a year in Ciudad Juárez. On Feb. 12, armed men attacked a Guadalajara nightclub, killing six people and wounding dozens more.

And in the Pacific tourist resort city of Acapulco, where the Mexican Open tennis tournament is being played, police reported finding a man’s hacked-up body in five plastic bags, in a low-income neighborhood far from where the tournament is being held. He was one of 13 people killed – many of them taxi drivers – in and around Acapulco last weekend, just before the tennis tournament started.

The Americano/Agencies

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