EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – At least seven civilians were killed in separate roadside mass shootings in the border state of Sonora, Mexico, in the past two days.
The Sonora Attorney General’s Office confirmed 11 people were shot Sunday inside a vehicle transporting farmworkers from a field called Campo San Francisco to the city of Caborca, Sonora. State authorities are investigating “the circumstances in which four people were killed and seven others wounded.”
Mexican news reports citing witnesses and police officers on the scene said the deceased included three minors and a 30-year-old woman. The reports also say the occupants of the targeted truck — which was carrying 29 laborers — yelled out to their assailants they were farm workers and the attack, an apparent case of mistaken identity, stopped.
The reports state Caborca is a hotbed of drug-related activity due to its proximity to the U.S. border. Caborca is about a two-hour drive southwest of Nogales, Arizona.
The other shooting took place the previous evening, when a family of four traveling on a highway from Hermosillo, Sonora, to Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua, were shot inside their vehicle between the towns of Yecora and Maycoba. The shooting claimed the lives of two women and a 2-year-old child.
“The (Sonora) state police is working with other law enforcement to find those responsible for the attack in Maycoba [….] to establish the circumstances of the loss of life of two women and a minor in Maycoba, near the border with Chihuahua,” the Sonora AG’s Office said on Sunday.
The agency also said it is working with law enforcement in Chihuahua to gather additional information on the case. The town of Yecora identified the female victims as Maria Estefania Valenzuela Jinez and Julieta Valenzuela, and the child as Julian Lopez Valenzuela.
The Sonora-Chihuahua border in the past four years has become a battleground between two rival drug cartels and includes the killings of civilians in cases of mistaken identity.
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