Gunmen killed fifteen people on an isolated ranch in northern Mexico, including a prominent farmworker leader, in the latest grisly attack in an area overrun by drug gangs, local police said on Friday. Margarito Montes, a well-known organiser of agricultural labourers, was among the bodies found riddled with bullets in trucks in the town of Hornos in southern Sonora, a state bordering the United States, a police spokesman said.
The cause of the crime was unknown but the killings had many of the hallmarks of hits by drug cartels, who often use automatic weapons to murder people in groups to send a message to rivals.