26 bodies dumped in Mexico's second city

Twenty six male bodies were dumped Thursday in three vehicles near a busy intersection in Mexico's second city of Guadalajara, some marked with drug cartel names, a local official said. The macabre discovery came just ahead of a major international book fair in the western city and a day after 17 charred bodies were found in two vehicles in the city of Culiacan, in Sinaloa state, further north on the Pacific coast. "There were 26 corpses altogether, all male and aged from 25 to 35 years," Fernando Guzman, a top official in Jalisco state, of which Guadalajara is capital, told a news conference Thursday afternoon. Most of the men had been asphixiated and some were marked with the words Milenio and Zetas -- the names of drug gangs -- written in oil, Guzman said. The Zetas -- set up by ex-army officers turned hitmen in the 1990s -- are blamed for extortion, kidnappings and murders in ever-increasing areas of Mexico. The Milenio gang is known to operate in Jalisco and media reports recently suggested it had joined forces with the Zetas. Jalisco state, known as a stronghold of the Sinaloa cartel of fugitive billionaire druglord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, has seen drug violence increase in recent months, including shootouts and roadblocks early in the year. Jalisco state Governor Emilio Gonzalez said on his Twitter account he was "outraged" by the discovery of the bodies and called for a probe. The spectacular act of dumping bodies on a busy highway echoed another incident in September in which 35 bodies were tipped out of trucks under a busy overpass in the eastern port of Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico.  Authorities blamed those killings on the New Generation drug gang, which has suspected ties to the Sinaloa gang and also calls itself the Zeta Killers. The vehicles found Thursday lay close to the city's convention center, which will host the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the most important event of its kind in the Spanish-speaking world, starting this weekend. Scores of authors, including Nobel laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Herta Muller, were expected to attend. A survey released this week found few Mexicans believe the government can defeat drug cartels as its military crackdown on organized crime enters its sixth year. The poll, by the Mitofsky agency, showed 14 percent believed President Felipe Calderon’s strategy was succeeding, compared to 23 percent in a poll in March 2010. The latest poll, of 1,000 people interviewed in October, showed 44 percent thought the situation would not improve during Calderon's last year in office, which ends in December 2012. Some 45,000 deaths have been blamed on rising drug violence since the start of the crackdown, which includes tens of thousands of security forces.