Some 105 tonnes of marijuana has been seized in Mexico, in what is expected to become the country’s biggest ever drug bust.
Eleven people were arrested yesterday in the city of Tijuana after a pre-dawn gun battle between members of the drug cartel and police and soldiers - two people were injured.
The marijuana was found in six cargo containers in a warehouse, wrapped in 10,000 packages and has a street value of £215million.
President Felipe Calderon, who recently visited Tijuana, launched the nationwide crackdown four years ago, deploying some 50,000 troops.
Last year, Mexican security forces confiscated a total of 2,105 tonnes of marijuana, according to government figures.
Mexico's border regions, especially the major towns directly on the U.S. frontier, have witnessed the brunt of the conflict with notable spikes in particularly gruesome violence in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, which borders Texas further to the east.
Violence peaked in Tijuana in 2008 amid a showdown between two crime bosses - Fernando 'The Engineer' Sanchez Arellano and Teodoro 'El Teo' Garcia Simental, a renegade lieutenant who rose through the ranks by dissolving bodies in vats of lye.
Garcia was arrested last January. While killings have continued, the most gruesome displays of cartel violence - decapitations, hangings and daylight shootouts - subsided.
Last week, in the wake of President Calderon's visit, several bodies were found beheaded and hanging from bridges in Tijuana, leading to fears that the cartels were resuming brutal tactics to send a message that the government is not in control.
In Ciudad Juarez, gunmen burst into a private party on Sunday and shot dead nine people, including six members of one family, security officials said.
Four people died on the spot, two others died in hospital, and the remaining two were hunted down by the gunmen and shot dead near the airport.
Nine others were killed in separate attacks in the past 24 hours in Mexico's most violent city, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, according to police.
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