Mexicans mourn drug war victims on Day of the Dead

By Robin Emmott

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - Black-clad widows, mothers and orphaned children laid plastic flowers at the graves of drug war victims on Monday as Mexicans in one of the world's most violent cities celebrated the Day of the Dead.

As people across Mexico packed cemeteries to heap traditional marigolds, candy skulls and candles on tombs, the joyful annual festival popular with U.S. tourists was a painful, somber affair in the northern city of Ciudad Juarez.

"Why my son? Why did they take him from me?" cried Reynalda Regalado dressed in black, as musicians in sombreros serenaded the grave of her 26-year-old police officer son who was shot in the back by drug hitmen in June.

Some in Ciudad Juarez's main cemetery on the U.S. border blasted brassy Norteno music out of their cars near the graves of loved ones, victims of a drug war that has killed more than 2,000 people in the city this year.

"They shot my brother dead at a family party, they killed my two uncles too," said 20-year-old Karen Dominguez by her brother's grave, a mound of earth with a white wooden cross. Her brother's five orphaned children stood quietly by.

Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, has become the bloodiest flashpoint in Mexico's three-year fight against feuding drug cartels. In the city's rubbish-strewn San Rafael cemetery new graves are dug and filled every day.

Many of the victims are poor drug dealers, addicts, cops and teenage hitmen caught in the middle of a war across Mexico that has killed some 15,000 people since President Felipe Calderon sent troops to crush feuding cartels in late 2006.

Unlike the gaudy stone and emerald-encrusted mausoleums of Mexico's murdered drug kingpins, many victims' families barely have enough money for a space in the municipal graveyard in the dusty, barren outskirts of Ciudad Juarez.

In a corner of the San Rafael cemetery, lines of unmarked, freshly dug graves mark the unidentified drug war dead. Weeds grow between empty beer bottles by the months-old graves, and a few plastic flowers stick up through the rocky soil in the arid area where fresh blooms are expensive and hard to come by.

"They shot a guy dead here last week when he came to bury his brother," said graveyard worker Hugo de Leon, who makes the cement headstones for the few that can afford them. "These guys, they have no mercy," he said of the drug hitmen.

"PUT AWAY YOUR GUNS"

On the Day of the Dead, Mexicans keep alive a tradition that blends Catholic rituals with the pre-Hispanic belief that the dead return once a year from the underworld.

Drug violence adds a grim undercurrent to the day. From Mexico's marijuana-growing Michoacan state in the west to Tijuana on the border with San Diego, families went to graveyards to mourn victims of the cartel war.

Ciudad Juarez was once a freewheeling city, attracting U.S. tourists for its bars, brothels and cheap medicines. But it has become a battleground for smugglers fighting for control of its lucrative local drug market and its strategic road and rail links into Texas and deep into the United States.

Since Mexico's most-wanted man Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman sent his henchmen to fight for Ciudad Juarez early last year, the town has become one of the world's top murder capitals.