Mexico: 43 dead in 3-hour firefight on ranch in west

At least 43 people died Friday in what authorities described as a fierce, three-hour gunbattle between federal forces and suspected drug gang gunmen on a ranch in western Mexico, the deadliest such confrontation in recent memory. All the dead were suspected criminals except for one federal police officer, National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said. He said the officer died trying to help a colleague wounded in the shootout. Photographs from the scene showed bodies, some with semi-automatic rifles and others without weapons, lying in fields, near farm equipment and on a blood-stained patio strewn with clothes, mattresses and sleeping bags.

The rest of the presumed criminals on the property started to attack with intensity.

National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido

Rubido said the suspects were members of “a criminal organization operating in Jalisco state,” but did not mention the Jalisco New Generation, the drug cartel that dominates the area where the battle erupted and has grown rapidly in recent years to become one of Mexico’s biggest organized crime groups. Rubido said the confrontation started Friday morning in the municipality of Tanhauto on the border between Jalisco and Michoacan states when soldiers, federal police and state and federal investigators responded to a report of the sudden appearance of armed men on a ranch. During the operation, federal forces encountered a truck full of armed men who opened fire and when they chased the gunmen onto the ranch, they came under heavy fire by others, he said.

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