Criminals behead 2 in drug war

MEXICO CITY — The drug war in the southern Mexican states of Guerrero and Michoacan took a gruesome turn Thursday with the discovery of the head of a police commander who had resigned his post just days earlier in the face of death threats.

"So that you learn to respect," read a message scrawled on a red sheet attached to a Guerrero state government building in Acapulco, where passers-by in the early morning hours discovered the heads of former Police Commander Mario Nunez Magana, 35, of the Municipal Preventive Police, and another man, who was not identified.

Acapulco officials would not confirm news reports that identified the second victim as a police officer.

More than 140 people, including many police officers and commanders, have been killed in the western states of Guerrero and Michoacan this year as the so-called Sinaloa and Gulf cartels struggle for control of methamphetamine production, street drug sales, cocaine shipping points and other elements of a lucrative trade in illicit drugs.

The decapitated heads were discovered at about 3 a.m. in a plaza fronted by a church and the state Finance and Administration headquarters, the same location where Commander Nunez led a police unit during a January battle with gunmen believed to be from both of the rival cartels.

Four suspected "narcos" were shot and killed in the January incident, which began with the drug bands fighting each other with automatic weapons and hand grenades. Nunez led the rapid-response police unit that arrived at the scene and exchanged fire with the gunmen.

Two other suspected cartel operatives were seriously wounded in the gunfire, along with two passers-by. Nunez had been receiving death threats ever since, officials said.

After two months of hesitation, Nunez resigned his post over the weekend, said Jorge Valdez Reynosa, a spokesman for the Municipal Preventive Police.

"He wasn't happy," Valdez said. "He said he was getting threats."

Armed men kidnapped Nunez on Wednesday as he and his father traveled in a pickup truck near his home. "The kidnappers told his father not to get involved, that the problem wasn't with him," Valdez said.

After the discovery of the heads, which were inside plastic trash bags, police found the victims' bodies at about 8 a.m. a few hundred yards away in a school parking lot.

The incident came hours after Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca announced a $12 million project to give more firepower to police, who say they often are outgunned by the cartels. The state will purchase more than 1,400 rifles, 274 patrol vehicles, body armor and communications equipment.

Twelve people have been killed in drug-related violence in Acapulco this year. Grenades have become a weapon of choice, and were used in three other attacks along Guerrero's Pacific coast this month, in Acapulco, Zihuatanejo and Petatlan, nearby.

Police storm plant

during clashes

MEXICO CITY — Hundreds of police officers stormed a key steel plant in southwestern Mexico on Thursday, attempting to clear out striking workers in clashes that killed at least two people, authorities said.

Police fired tear gas in an attempt to evict workers who seized the Sicartsa steel plant to protest a change in the leadership of their national union. The confrontation spilled into the streets in the Pacific port city of Lazaro Cardenas, 215 miles southwest of Mexico City. Daniel Vargas, a spokesman for the city, said two workers were shot to death and 36 injured.

— The Associated Press