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Mexican soldiers fought gun battles with drug cartel hitmen near the U.S. border after gangsters abducted local police in violence that killed 21 people and left bodies strewn in the desert.

Soldiers pursued the hitmen through freezing desert in the northern state of Chihuahua after they dragged nine people, including some police, out of houses and shot six of them at a ranch in the early hours of Tuesday, the army said.

Heavily armed soldiers burst into the ranch, near the Texan border, and shot dead several of the hitmen, later chasing another group by helicopter before killing them too, army spokesman Enrique Torres said from the area…

The surge in bloodshed has scared off foreign tourists and investors along the border just as the global economic crisis is pushing Mexico into recession…

More than 2,000 of the drug war deaths recorded last year were in Chihuahua state, including the murder of 13 people at a party in August.

The presence of more than 3,000 troops and federal police in Chihuahua has done nothing to contain the violence. Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing city in the desert across from El Paso, Texas, has seen beheadings, daily shootouts and a surge in kidnappings and extortion.

Just in case you were thinking of a day trip.