MEXICO CITY – President Barack Obama's administration named 54
alleged Mexican drug
cartel lieutenants and enforcers as drug kingpins Wednesday under a law that
allows the U.S. government to freeze their bank accounts and penalize
their business associates.
The action, carried out as part of the Foreign
Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, involves members of the Gulf Cartel and a gang of
former Gulf cartel hit men known as the Zetas, Adam J. Szubin, director
of the Treasury
Department Office of Foreign Assets Control, said Wednesday in
Washington.
Dozens of cartel-related businesses and individuals
have already been named, allowing authorities over the past decade to
seize $13 million and freeze $3 million in drug-related assets.
The administration's announcement came the day after
top U.S. Cabinet officials led by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
visited Mexico to
underscore their shared responsibility for the drug-related violence
that has killed 17,900 people since President
Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006.
In Ciudad Juarez, the country's most violent
city, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, at least seven people were
killed in three shooting attacks.
Two sisters, ages 17 and 19, were slain by gunmen who
barged into their home Wednesday afternoon, said state police spokesman Arturo Sandoval.
Moments later, gunmen killed the manager of a factory
as he drove toward a military checkpoint, Sandoval said.
The killings followed the murders of four young men
who were remodeling a storefront they had rented to a funeral agency
when assailants sprayed them with gunfire. The victims included two
brothers, a cousin and a friend.
Sandoval said the mother of one of the victims said
the youths, aged 17 to 23, had previously received threats from a
criminal gang demanding they pay protection money if they wanted to
operate the storefront. According to her, the victims refused to pay.
Mexico's drug gangs often branch out into kidnapping
and extortion.
In other violence:
_Police in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego,
California, were searching for the killers of a man whose charred
and mutilated body was found near the border fence and a second man who
was shot to death on a downtown street.
_Also in Tijuana, 150 federal workers poured into the
streets following a bomb scare. No bomb was found, and workers returned
to their offices within a few hours.
_Officials in the northern border city of Mexicali,
fired the city's police chief, blaming him in part for the alleged
failure of police
officers to detain a possibly drunk local legislative leader
after allegedly finding drugs in his car.
Meanwhile, authorities were investigating the case of
a drug suspect who was arrested over the weekend and then turned up
dead Monday, his body showing signs of torture. The incident happened in
Santa Catarina, a
suburb of the northern city of Monterrey.
The police officers who detained the suspect are
being investigated, Alejandro Garza y Garza, attorney general of Nuevo
Leon state told Milenio television.
Santa
Catarina security chief Rene Castillo said he had no knowledge of
the case.
"I don't know anything, I don't know anything, I
don't know anything. That's my position," Castillo told The Associated
Press.