MEXICO CITY — Dramatic bouts of violence and mayhem in two regions of Mexico this week have left at least 12 dead and dozens of businesses torched, dramatizing the ability of crime gangs to wreak havoc and shatter the semblance of normality almost anywhere in the country without warning.
On Friday, hundreds of Mexican troops were dispatched to the northern border city of Ciudad Juárez in a bid to bolster security after a series of apparently random gang attacks across town on Thursday and early Friday that left at least 11 dead— including a popular radio personality and three of his co-workers, and two inmates shot in a prison riot. Assailants armed with guns and Molotov cocktails targeted convenience stores, gas stations, a pizza shop and vehicles.
The killings just across the Rio Grande from El Paso came days after roaming bands of criminals hundreds of miles away to the south set fire to dozens of shops, buses and cars, and threw up roadblocks on major arteries across a wide swath of the states of Jalisco and Guanajuato. Among the sites attacked there were some two dozen outlets of Oxxo, a nationwide fast-food, convenience-store chain. Authorities reported one fatality.
