Curioso

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) -- A gunbattle between Mexican soldiers and suspected drug cartel members left 22 dead at ranch near the U.S. border, the Defense Department said Thursday.

All the dead were suspected gang members, the department said in a statement. One soldier was injured.

The military said the drug suspects provoked the gunbattle Wednesday morning, opening fire on soldiers conducting reconnaissance patrols at a ranch on the outskirts of Ciudad Mier, a northeastern town about 18 miles (30 kilometers) south of the border with Texas.

Soldiers seized 55 grenades, 18 rifles, four handguns guns, 99 ammunition clips, 1,540 rounds of ammunition and vehicles at the ranch, the statement said. They also found military style uniforms, which are frequently used by drug gangs staging attacks. Clips are what we gun-illiterate journalists call the magazine thingees that hold the bullets, and we don't know what color the rifles were, but if they were black, then they were evil "assault rifles". The grenades were probably purchased in Texas at a gun show.

The fighting erupted hours before celebrations started across Mexico for the bicentennial anniversary of its independence from Spain. Fortunately, nothing interrupts a party in happy old Mexico.

It did not disrupt festivities in the main cities in northeastern Mexico, where violence has reached war-like proportions this year amid a split between the Gulf cartel and its former gang of henchmen, the Zetas.

Gunbattles erupt frequently between soldiers and gang members, who sometimes stage road blockades to disrupt military operations or keep security forces from calling in reinforcements during shootouts. Sometimes, assailants steal buses and even motorists out of their cars to use in the blockades. The soldiers never initiate any gunbattles because they are usually outmatched in firepower and tactical intelligence. Many of their leaders have lucrative financial arrangements with the drug gangs.

Across Mexico, drug-gang violence has claimed an unprecedented 28,000 lives since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of troops and federal police to fight the cartels in their strongholds along the U.S. border and in Pacific coast states.

A hypothetical investigator might even think to himself "I wonder how high the drug profits reach?" and "why is it that El Presidente takes such an active interest in deploying the troops and the police federale just so, - yet they are not quite in the right place to catch the drug gangs when the drugs move to the border?"

But if the investigator thought aloud, he might have an accidente.