Toll in Mexico drug city hits record of 2,000

Last year, 1,653 violent deaths were reported in the border city across from El Paso, Texas, in what was already considered a record.

The death toll has already reached 2,000 this year in Ciudad Juarez, in a new record for Mexico's most violent city, according to an AFP count based on police reports.

Last year, 1,653 violent deaths were reported in the border city across from El Paso, Texas, in what was already considered a record.

Ciudad Juarez is at the heart of Mexico's spiraling drug violence, in which some 14,000 people have died nationwide since a military clampdown on drug gangs began at the end of 2006.

Authorities say the border city is the battleground for the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels and their offshoots who are struggling to control key trafficking routes into the United States, the world's number one consumer of cocaine.

The deployment of 8,500 troops in Ciudad Juarez, out of some 50,000 deployed in a nationwide crackdown, has so failed to stem the violence.

Police found five bodies in the city of 1.3 million people on Monday, including a lawyer shot 15 times in his car, according to local justice officials.