MEXICO CITY (AP) — Suspected drug cartel gunmen opened fire on a car in northern Mexico on Monday, killing a 3-year-old boy and wounding the child’s parents, authorities said.
The father, who was driving in the city of Ciudad Obregon when the attack happened, managed to get the car to a hospital, where the toddler was pronounced dead, prosecutors in the border state of Sonora said. The gunmen escaped.
“It hurts us as a society when drug cartels take the lives of children,” the state prosecutors’ office said in a statement.
Sonora has been wracked by gang violence, including the killings of Indigenous people.
In recent weeks, DNA tests on skeletal remains found near an apparent drug cartel encampment confirmed that five of the remains belonged to some of seven missing men from Mexico’s most persecuted Indigenous group, the Yaquis. The Yaqui men were abducted in mid-July near Ciudad Obregon.
The state prosecutor’s office has suggested that the murder of Yaqui leader Tomás Rojo Valencia in May was also the work of drug cartels or allied local gangs.
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