School official reports deadly violence in Valle Hermoso

Deadly violence continued in Mexico on Wednesday with reports of a running gun battle in Valle Hermoso, where several people were reported to have been killed.

A high-ranking school official said he had heard reports of at least five people found dead in a shootout Wednesday believed to have been between drug cartels across this city about 25 miles southwest of Matamoros.

Residents feared for their lives as they awaited the arrival of military forces, expected Thursday, the official said. The official said no school will be held Thursday.

One schoolteacher was confronted by men in an SUV, who accused him of following them and pointed a machinegun at him, the official said. The teacher was clubbed with a gun and returned home bloodied.

No other information was immediately available.

Wednesday’s reports from Valle Hermoso follow several days of violence in Mexican cities stretching from Ciudad Mier — across the border from eastern Zapata County — to Matamoros and coincided with the sentencing in Houston of former Gulf Cartel kingpin Osiel Cárdenas Guillén.

Since his arrest in 2003, top leaders of the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas have developed a loose power-sharing agreement in northern Tamaulipas, according to a series of federal indictments handed down last year.

A paramilitary group founded by former Mexican special forces officers, the Zetas once served as the cartel’s enforcement arm but has since developed into a major drug trafficking organization in its own right.

While each organization continues to operate largely independently, together they decide matters ranging from payments owed to top leaders and the price of drugs on the open market. However, U.S. law enforcement officials say members of that alliance may now be battling each other for dominance over the region across the border from the Rio Grande Valley.