REYES RAMOS
  Associated Press

  CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Police have dug up 11 bodies in the backyard of a house in this Mexican border city, in what they called the latest evidence of a
  growing drug battle being waged along the U.S.-Mexico frontier.

  Officials said Tuesday they believed they had found all the bodies buried at the property, but they were still searching to make sure none remained.

  "If we have to demolish the house, we're going to demolish it," Deputy Attorney General Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos said in Mexico City.

  Several victims had been strangled or suffocated, Vasconcelos said.

  Mexican investigators said the property appeared to be a safe house for Humberto Santillan Tabares, who was arrested Jan. 15 across the border in El
  Paso, Texas. Mexican authorities identified Santillan as one of the chief lieutenants of Vicente Carrillo, alleged to be one of Mexico's major drug traffickers.

  Leticia Zamarripa, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, confirmed that Santillan was arrested in El Paso with
  more than 10 pounds of cocaine, although she said his first name was listed as Heriberto.

  Drug smugglers often use several different names, and it was unclear which was Santillan's real first name. He was in federal custody awaiting trial, and no
  date has been set.

  Four bodies were found over the weekend, and seven others were uncovered under a concrete patio that officials ripped up Monday.

  Authorities said they also discovered three bags of clothing. Some of it was identified by the relatives of two people who disappeared on Jan. 14.

  Neighbors said the house, in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, was the home of a couple with two children. Asking that their names not be used, they
  told reporters that they often saw people dressed as federal police officers coming and going, but noted nothing else peculiar.

  Drug groups often pose as police, but sometimes also enlist corrupt lawmen.

  The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says Carrillo is one of the key figures who took over a Ciudad Juarez-based drug organization that had been led
  by his brother Amado, who died in 1997 after plastic surgery in Mexico City.

  In July, U.S. federal prosecutors arrested an FBI translator in El Paso who was accused of selling sensitive information that was believed to have reached
  Carrillo.

  The bodies appear to be part of a recent wave of drug-related violence - and not connected to a notorious string of murders of young women here over
  the past decade.

  Authorities say the arrests of several major traffickers created a power vacuum, and the resulting turf battle has left dozens dead along the border and in
  Mexico's interior.

  On Sunday, an apparently drug-related shootout killed three people in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. Federal officials have said deserters from an elite
  Mexican army unit who formed a drug gang have been fighting for control of that border town.

  On Friday, a shootout between police and several presumed drug traffickers in the northern city of Anahuac, 50 miles southwest of Nuevo Laredo, killed
  two state police officers and another person.

  Authorities also say traffickers apparently were involved in the ambush slaying of two federal agents and a soldier last week on a highway west of Mexico
  City and in many of the 57 slayings so far this year in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.

  Santiago Vasconcelos said the violence was evidence the battle against traffickers was serious.

  "This makes all of us uneasy," he said, "but it is better to have these incidents, clashes over the application of the law, than to permit in silence" the
  operation of the gangs.