Meanwhile, in another part of Mexico, an angry crowd beat and hanged seven suspected kidnappers, leaving some of their bodies dangling from trees, the national Human Rights Commission said Thursday night. "Unfortunately, this conflict results in these kinds of acts that justifiably alarm the public." "Certain criminal gangs are fighting over territory, to control activities related to drug production distribution and consumption," López Solís said. The state attorney general said the killings discovered Thursday appeared to be part of a turf war. "We're worse off now than we were then," Mora said. Hipólito Mora, one of the original founders of the vigilante movement, said the violence is worse than ever and he wants the army to come back to Michoacan to help battle the cartels. What followed were eight years of terror in Michoacan, until farmers and ranchers rose up in an armed vigilante movement to drive La Familia and its successor cartel, the Caballero's Templarios, out of the state. Uruapan is where Mexico's drug war first erupted in 2006, when members of the now-diminished La Familia cartel rolled five severed heads onto the floor of a dance hall. In one particularly brazen attack in May, a convoy of pickups and SUVs openly marked with the letters "CJNG" - the Spanish initials of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel - drove through the Michoacan city of Zamora at night, shooting up police vehicles and killing or wounding several officers. "This kind of cynical impunity has been increasing in Michoacan," Hope added. "This kind of public, theatrical violence, where you don't just kill, but you brag about killing, is meant to intimidate rivals and send a message to the authorities," said Mexico security analyst Alejandro Hope. "Be a patriot, kill a Viagra," the banner read in part. While the banner was not completely legible, it bore the initials of the notoriously violent Jalisco drug cartel, and mentioned the Viagras, a rival gang. Some were hung with their hands bound, some with their pants pulled down. The victims in the city of Uruapan had been shot to death. Two of the bodies hung by ropes from the overpass by their necks, half naked, and one of the dismembered bodies were women, Michoacan Attorney General Adrián López Solís said at a news conference. The killing spree reported by prosecutors in the western state of Michoacan marked a return to the grisly massacres carried out by drug cartels at the height of Mexico's 2006-2012 drug war, when piles of bodies were dumped on roadways as a message to authorities and rival gangs. Just down the road were three more bodies, for a total of 19. MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexican police found nine bodies hanging from an overpass Thursday alongside a drug cartel banner threatening rivals, and seven more corpses hacked up and dumped by the road nearby.
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