Five severed heads left outside Mexican school

28 September 2011 Last updated at 04:55 ET BBC

Mexican police have found five decomposing heads left in a sack outside a primary school in Acapulco.

Handwritten messages were also found, reportedly threatening the state governor as well as local drug lords.

It was not clear if the discovery of the heads and five decapitated bodies elsewhere in the city was linked to extortion threats against teachers.

Dozens of schools have been closed since last month after teachers went on strike over security concerns.

Police were called to a street in the Garita neighbourhood of Acapulco on Tuesday morning.

There they found a sack inside a wooden crate placed near the school, officers said.

Inside were the heads of five men, as well as the threatening messages.

Threats
Police had earlier discovered five headless bodies in another part of the city, left either inside or near a burned-out vehicle.

Acapulco, on Mexico's Pacific coast, has seen several episodes of gruesome violence as drug gangs fight for control of the resort city.

The new school year has been disrupted

But as the government crackdown on cartels continues, criminal organisations here and in other parts of Mexico are fracturing and increasingly turning to extortion.

Last month, as the new school year began, dozens of teachers in Acapulco said criminal gangs had threatened them with violence if they did not hand over half their salaries from 1 October.

They and colleagues have since been on strike, leading to the closure of more than 100 schools.

Guerrero State Governor Angel Aguirre has promised a series of measures, including increased police patrols and the installation of security cameras and panic buttons in schools.

But teachers say they still fear for their own and pupils' safety.

One striking teacher told the BBC that although they welcomed the governor's proposals, they could not expect the situation to improve overnight.

Is Drug Legalization the Only Answer?

Terrror in Acapulco. Wishful Thinking Will Not Control Latin American Gangs.

One of the true outrages of human behavior is that in the downward spiral to depravity, outrage accelerates and becomes a virus copied and transferred by the maggots that infect the herd. It is a universal pathology. We see many current examples, most recently in the religion of peace. The insanity hard-wired into Islam allowed the mimicking of suicide bombing to accelerate to the point that the supply of suicide murderers actually exceeds demand.

Abhorrent and lethal behavior developed in Chechnya, was copied in Iraq and has since blown-back to Afghanistan.

There has always been the fear that the violent atrocities in Iraq would be copied and further developed outside of Iraq. The concern was ridiculed and twisted to be anti-American, leftist, and non-patriotic, but the drivel about being able to isolate and destroy the jihadis on a select field of battle in Iraq so we would not fight them in the Americas (as if Baghdad was Agincourt), was always patent nonsense.

Well, the wheel, as always, turns, and in this case towards our neighbor to the south. Latin American gangs in Mexico have brazenly spiced things up a notch.

An assault and attack in Acapulco has a real whiff of some jihadi salsa. Narco-terrorist gangs, dressed as police, attack government offices, murder police and government officials and video record the attack.

Latin America is rife with human flotsam. It is churned out in battalion strength, funded by drug money and virulent antiestablishment Marxists and anarchists. Many of them are in every American city. There are many more potential terrorists in the US from Latin america than there are from the Middle East. They are lethal and have the potential to become more so. I hope this is not a hint of things to come, but security and national policies should never be built on wishful thinking.

Seven dead in Acapulco ambushes

"Acapulco used to be a paradise resort before the gangs moved in"

At least seven people have been killed in simultaneous attacks on government offices in Mexico's resort of Acapulco.
In one attack, gunmen opened fire at a state attorney general's office, killing two policemen, a public prosecutor and a secretary.

Elsewhere, two policemen and a secretary were killed when another group attacked a police station.

The attacks come after President Felipe Calderon ordered thousands of troops to the city to tackle drug-related crime.

The twin assaults, which occurred just before 1100 (1700 GMT), were carried out by groups of about eight heavily armed gunmen said to be wearing army-style khaki uniforms. At one of the offices a gunman asked those inside "Are you the only ones here?", before the other men opened fire. Eyewitnesses say both attacks were filmed by the gangs.

President Calderon has called an emergency meeting with his security cabinet to discuss the attacks in two neighbourhoods about 15km (nine miles) north of the tourist zone.

Wave of attacks

The BBC's Duncan Kennedy in Mexico says Acapulco, once a haven for film stars, has suffered a wave of attacks in the past year as rival drug cartels fight to control coastal smuggling routes.

Last month the president sent almost 8,000 troops and federal police to the region to tackle the gangs. A further 16,000 have been sent to other lawless regions of the country.

Tourists have not been immune from Acapulco's violence either. On Saturday two Canadian travellers suffered minor injuries after being grazed by bullets at one of the city's hotels.

In January there were 190 gang-related deaths in Mexico - just a handful less than a year ago despite the government crackdown.