A family of six, including three children, was killed by gunmen in the southern Mexican border state of Chiapas on Friday, in a city wracked by cartel-backed militia violence.
Julio Perez, the mayor of the town of Pantelho in Chiapas, said the killings took place there on Friday and called it a “massacre”. Two warring militia groups suspected of being backed by drug cartels have been fighting for control of the city.
In a brief statement, the state attorney's office said three suspects were arrested but that neither the victims nor those arrested have been identified.
It was the latest in a series of mass murders in which hitmen have wiped out entire families in Mexico.
On Sunday, armed men broke into a house in the north-central state of Guanajuato and killed four women and two children.
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Both Chiapas, which shares a border with Guatemala, and Guanajuato have been battered by bloody gang turf battles in recent years.
Local media reported that the gunmen entered the house in the city of León in Guanajuato in search of a family man. When they learned that he had already fled, they killed the women and children.
The murders in Guanajuato have attracted special attention because the images from the surveillance cameras showed five National Guard officers entering the house five minutes before the murders took place. They left the house with a large black plastic bag just before the killers arrived.
On Friday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said five officers of the quasi-military National Guard had been detained for violations of military discipline and were in the custody of the Defense Department, but declined to give further details on the case.
Chiapas, where the family was killed on Friday, has been hit by recent violence, especially in the weeks leading up to the June 2 presidential election.
Last month, officials said there were two remaining attacks on mayoral candidates in Mexico's election nine people dead in Chiapas. A few days before, six people, including a minor candidate and the mayor's office Lucero López, died in an ambush after a campaign rally in Chiapas. Around the same time, 11 people died in mass shootings in a town in the municipality of Chicomuselo, Chiapas.
The situation in Chiapas has deteriorated due to a war that is being carried out between the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels in a region known as La Frailesca, which includes Villa Corzo and La Concordia.
Claudia Sheinbaum became the first wife to win the country's presidency earlier this month. Two policies they have already been killed in Mexico since Sheinbaum's historic election.
