Fed Up, A Mexican Town Resorts To Mob Justice 
 
 itoggle caption Jesus Alcazar/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Unprecedented levels of violence in Mexico led residents of a small town in the northern state of Chihuahua to take justice into their own hands. 
 
 This week an angry mob of citizens pursued and allegedly killed two suspected kidnappers, storming a military base to get at the alleged culprits believed to have nabbed a teenage girl. 
 
 With police incapable of stopping the violent crime epidemic in Mexico amid the brutal drug war, it seems some locals in the town of Ascension have had enough. 
 
 Ascension is a farming community of some 15,000 people, about 100 miles south of the border with New Mexico. In the past two years, kidnapping and extortion have been rampant. 
 
 "Our problems with public security have spoiled our progress in this town," says Rafael Camarillo, the outgoing mayor. 
 
 The public fury happened Tuesday when an armed group allegedly kidnapped a 16-year-old girl from her family's seafood restaurant. The kidnappers escaped down a gravel road, and word of the missing girl spread quickly. 
 
 Soon, a group of about 200 residents began the chase. Three of the alleged kidnappers were captured by the Mexican military, who have a presence in the town. 
 
 If the authorities can't protect us, we must protect ourselves. 
 
 Three others fled into a nearby cotton field, where one was later found dead. The other two were hunted down and beaten by the mob from Ascension. 
 
 "When they found them, it was a direct aggression," says Ignacio Rodriguez, a local kitchen-cabinet maker who was elected to head city council next month. 
 
 The girl was rescued unharmed by the residents. 
 
 "We are a small community," says Mari Cruz Salazar Soto, the girl's aunt. "In the past year, we've averaged three kidnappings a week." 
 
 Rodriguez says he knows many people in town whose family members have been kidnapped, and many of them were among the angry crowd. 
 
 "In that moment there was a lot of resentment mixed with rage," he says. 
 
 Rodriguez says people in the mob recognized the two alleged kidnappers, 17-year-old boys who grew up in Ascension. "We don't know why they chose to get mixed up in crime," he says. 
 
 Federal police eventually took custody of the two young men and drove them to the town's small military base. 
 
 Residents say at least 1,000 people then caught up with them at the base and broke through the gates. The mob got ahold of the suspected kidnappers and beat them a second time. 
 
 The crowd then held them for seven hours, locked in a hot vehicle where they eventually died. 
 
 The next day, Mayor Camarillo fired all 14 of the town's police officers and requested assistance from state and federal police. The camera of a local television station captured residents as they stormed city hall on Wednesday morning and demanded the firings. 
 
 Jorge Leyva, a representative of the Chihuahua state police, said an investigation into the deaths of the two suspected kidnappers is under way. 
 
 Three other suspects were detained on charges of kidnapping and illegal weapon possession in the case. 
 
 Rodriguez, the future city councilman, says he's not proud of how his town responded to the kidnapping. Mob violence is not common in Chihuahua, one of the most violent states in the country. 
 
 Rodriguez says citizens in Ascension are forming a sort of neighborhood watch committee and are still deciding how the committee will operate. 
 
 "If the authorities can't protect us," he says, "we must protect ourselves." ||||| MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - Suspected drug hitmen killed the mayor of a town outside Mexico's northern business city of Monterrey on Thursday, the fourth public official slain in little over a month, police said. 
 
 Mayor Prisciliano Rodriguez was shot and killed by gunmen as he drove to his ranch in his town of Doctor Gonzalez, 30 miles (50 km) east of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon state, an official at the attorney general's office said. 
 
 It was not immediately clear why Rodriguez, who won the mayorship last year for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was targeted, but Nuevo Leon and the neighbouring state of Tamaulipas have become major drug war flashpoints since the start of the year. 
 
 Another person travelling with Rodriguez was also killed in the attack, Reforma newspaper reported, but police declined to comment. 
 
 Last month, drug gangs killed a mayor in the Nuevo Leon tourist town of Santiago and another mayor in the Tamaulipas municipality of Hidalgo that lies on a highway to Monterrey. 
 
 Another mayor was killed by suspected drug gangs in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi this month. 
 
 President Felipe Calderon, who has staked his presidency on a military-led assault on drug cartels, condemned the two killings in August and has vowed to continue his fight, saying that spiralling violence is a sign that the gangs are desperate and in disarray. 
 
 Rival hitmen from the Gulf cartel and its former armed wing, the Zetas, are fighting over smuggling routes into the United States. Both gangs increasingly target public officials, police and journalists who stand in their way. 
 
 Calderon has blamed the surge in violence around Monterrey and in Tamaulipas on the split between the Gulf and Zetas gang, but faces increasing pressure to calm the killings. More than 29,000 people have been killed in drug violence since Calderon sent more than 45,000 troops and federal police across Mexico in 2006 to battle warring drug gangs, prompting fears that bloodshed could undermine tourism and investment as Mexico slowly recovers from its worst recession since 1932. 
 
 The U.S. government in August told staff at its consulate in Monterrey to send their children out of the city, once considered one of Latin America's safest cities and a top regional business centre. There have been more than 450 drug killings in Monterrey and Nuevo Leon state this year. 
 
 (Reporting by Tomas Bravo; editing by Mohammad Zargham) ||||| EDS NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT - A man in military fatigues lies dead next a truck on a road after a gunbattle between rival drug gangs near the town of Ruiz, in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, Mexico,... (Associated Press) 
 
 A gunbattle between rival drug gangs in western Mexico left 29 bodies in fake military uniforms heaped across a roadway and inside bullet-riddled vehicles in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, the army said Thursday. 
 
 The bodies, all male, were found Wednesday scattered around 14 shot-up pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, two of which had bulletproofing. 
 
 Television images of the scene near the town of Ruiz showed what appeared to have been a convoy of cartel vehicles that was ambushed or engaged by another column of gunmen on a stretch of rural highway. Military-style boots, bulletproof vests, hand grenades and thousands of rounds of ammunition were found at the scene. 
 
 Federal and state officials gave conflicting reports on the incident. 
 
 Nayarit state police said officers responding to reports of a kidnapping found four wounded men at the scene of the shootout. One injured person died later, and three remain at the hospital, Nayarit officials said. 
 
 The army said two suspects wounded in the battle were found at the scene. It was unclear if the two reported by the army were included in, or additional to, the state figure. 
 
 The army said in a statement that around the same time Wednesday, soldiers engaged in a shootout with armed suspects in a town about 35 miles (60 kilometers) north of Ruiz. Two suspects _ a man and a woman _ were killed in that confrontation. The military statement did not say whether the two shootouts were related. 
 
 Nayarit's attorney general Oscar Herrera told a radio station that preliminary reports indicated the two gangs involved in the fierce highway battle were the Sinaloa and the Zetas drug cartels. He said one of the two cartels kidnapped a man of the rival gang, which resulted in a car chase and subsequent gunfight. 
 
 Nayarit and the nearby states of Michoacan and Zacatecas have become battlegrounds for drug cartels fighting for control of the area. 
 
 The Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's most powerful, has long been active in Nayarit, which borders its home base in Sinaloa state, but the gang has recently been challenged by the Zetas and by remnants of the Beltran Leyva cartel. 
 
 In nearby Michoacan state, officials said 500 marines and soldiers have been deployed to an area where at least 1,200 villagers fled their homes during three days of clashes between rival drug traffickers, which appeared to be unrelated to the Nayarit conflict. The government gave the families refuge at five shelters in two nearby towns. 
 
 The arrival of security forces Wednesday appeared to have soothed fears and hundreds of villagers decided to go back home by Thursday. Officials said only 300 people remained at the five shelters Thursday evening. 
 
 It is at least the second time a large number of rural residents have been displaced by drug violence in Mexico. In November, about 400 people in the northern border town of Ciudad Mier took refuge in the neighboring city of Ciudad Aleman following cartel gunbattles. That shelter has since been closed and most have returned to their homes. 
 
 Michoacan state Civil Defense Director Carlos Mandujano said the villagers were put up at a church, recreation center, event hall and schools in the towns of Buenavista Tomatlan and Apatzingan. 
 
 Mandujano said state authorities provided sleeping mats, blankets and food for those in the shelter. 
 
 Residents had reported after fleeing that gunbattles between rival drug cartel factions had made it too dangerous for them to stay in outlying hamlets. The latest reports said arsonists were burning avocado farms in the nearby town of Acahuato. 
 
 "We woke up with fear (on Monday), but things appeared to have quieted down. It wasn't until later that morning that we saw SUVs with armed men driving by very fast and shooting at each other," said a woman who did not want to be named for security reasons. 
 
 Several displaced people said they would stay at the shelters all week before considering going back to their villages. 
 
 "I am not scared, but my children are," said a mother, who asked not to be quoted by name because of fear of retaliation. 
 
 The fighting in Michoacan is believed to involve rival factions of the Michoacan-based La Familia drug cartel, some of whose members now call themselves "The Knights Templar." 
 
 Mexico still has fewer people displaced by violence than countries like Colombia, according to the Norway-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, which tracks such figures. It estimates about 230,000 people in Mexico have been driven from their homes, often to stay with relatives or in the United States. An estimated 3.6 million to 5.2 million people have been displaced by decades of drug- and guerrilla-war violence in Colombia. 
 
 Buenavista police chief Othoniel Montes Herrera said he has neither the manpower nor the armament to patrol rural areas frequented by drug gangs. Sending ill-armed officers out there "would be certain death, and we're not thinking of putting our personnel at that risk." 
 
 Drug violence has been on the rise in Nayarit, a Pacific Coast state known for its surfing and beach towns. In October, gunmen killed 15 people at a car wash in the capital of Tepic, an attack that police said bore the characteristics of organized crime. The bodies of 12 murder victims, eight of them partially burned, were found on a Nayarit dirt road a year ago. Officials have not identified the gangs fighting there. 
 
 And in Durango state, which borders Nayarit to the north, authorities have been excavating dozens of corpses from mass burial grounds used by drug cartel killers. 
 
 On Thursday, state police reported that two more bodies had been found in the latest excavation, bringing the total of bodies found at a seven lots in the state capital to 223. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon in Mexico City contributed to this report.
– At least seven people were killed in Acapulco yesterday in what police believe was a clash between rival drug gangs. Guns and grenades were used to attack a house in a residential part of the resort city, AP reports. Further north, suspected cartel hitmen killed the mayor of a small town outside Monterrey as he drove to his ranch. Mayor Prisciliano Rodriguez is the fourth public official assassinated in Mexico in just over a month, Reuters reports. As cartel violence continues to plague Mexico with no end in sight, mob justice is on the rise, reports NPR. In a small town in Chihuahua state where kidnapping and extortion have soared over the last two years, a mob pursued a gang that had kidnapped a teen girl, killing one and beating two others. Police took the beaten pair to a military base, where a crowd of around 1,000 broke through the gates, seized the men, and locked them in a hot vehicle where they eventually died. The town's mayor fired all 14 of the town's police officers the next day.