31 Killed for the last 48 hours in Mexico, including three children

Seven people were also shot Thursday and Friday, the source said. On Saturday, another person died as a result of his injuries. Of the 31 dead, there are four women and three teenagers, aged 14, 15 and 17. This bloodshed is the result of the settlement of accounts among rival drug traffickers who belong to the Jurez and Sinaloa cartels, he told AFP a spokesman for the prosecutor, Carlos Huerta.

The state of Chihuahua, which shares a broad border with the United States, is one of the Mexican states most affected by violence in connection with drug trafficking and operates in the Juárez cartel, the rival of other criminal groups of Sinaloa cartels. Authorities imposed more than 250 federal police officers in the region on Saturday. Just before this wave of murders, Governor Javier Corral secured at a security-dedicated meeting, so that 2018 would be the “public safety course in Chihuahua”.

The city of Juárez, near the city of Texas of El Paso, was between 2008 and 2012 one of the most dangerous cities in the world with more than 11,000 people killed -- most of them dealing with organised crime. A wave of violence has hit Mexico since 2006, leaving more than 200,000 people dead and thousands missing. At the end of November, 23,101 murders were registered in the country, a record figure since the introduction of statistics in 1997.

Experts say violence is the result of the war against drug trafficking initiated in 2006 by the government with military assistance, resulting in the fragmentation of cartels in smaller and more violent cells.