MEXICO CITY—Dozens of cartel gunmen engaged in a two-day battle with Mexican security forces that left at least 20 people dead in a small town across the border from Texas, officials said Sunday.
The clash is the latest incident in a surge of violence hitting Mexico, exacerbating doubts about the ability of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to control organized crime groups.
Last week, President Trump said he planned to declare Mexico’s cartels foreign terrorist organizations. In November, gunmen ambushed and killed three mothers and six of their children, all U.S. citizens living in a fundamentalist Mormon community in northern Mexico.
Mexican officials criticized the idea as opening the door to U.S. interference in its domestic affairs. U.S. Attorney General William Barr is expected to meet with Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard to discuss security issues later this week.
On Saturday, a caravan of gunmen in trucks, many marked with the initials of the Northeast Cartel, drove into the small town of Villa Unión, about 44 miles from the city of Eagle Pass, Texas, according to officials. The gunmen shot up municipal offices and other buildings.
Videos posted on social media and broadcast on Mexican television showed plumes of black smoke rising above the town, a burning vehicle and the pockmarked facade of Villa Unión’s town hall, as intense shooting is heard in the background.
Coahuila state Gov. Miguel Angel Riquelme said 14 of the dead were believed to be cartel gunmen, four were state police and two were civilians kidnapped by the gunmen and executed. Six police officers were also wounded.
“I want to underscore the courage of the 15 police officers who initially fought off more than 60 criminals for more than an hour and one half” before reinforcements arrived, the governor said in a statement on Sunday.
He said 17 vehicles, four of them armored and armed with .50-caliber machine guns, had been seized by security forces.
Seven of the alleged cartel gunmen were killed on Saturday. Another seven were killed Sunday as security forces backed by helicopters searched roads from where the gunmen had come, state authorities said.
As they retreated, gunmen took some six residents hostage in this town of 6,000. Four of them were rescued alive, according to the governor’s statement.
The attack on Villa Unión comes after hundreds of gunmen overpowered Mexican security forces and terrorized the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacán in northwestern Mexico for hours in October. The operation by members of the Sinaloa cartel sought the release a drug kingpin who had been captured by Mexican soldiers.
The cartel leader, Ovidio Guzmán, son of notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, was freed by Mexican security forces after the gunmen held several soldiers hostage, who were also eventually released.
Since the Sinaloa cartel was able to liberate the younger Mr. Guzmán in Culiacán, other cartels in different parts of the country have gone on the offensive against the government, says Raúl Benítez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
“They see the government as very weak,” he said. “They are imitating the effective strategy and have gone on a very intense offensive against the government.”
Since 2006, more than 250,000 people have been killed in the internecine war between cartels for control of drug routes and territory, according to Mexican government estimates. At least 40,000 more are missing, many buried in clandestine graves, according to government figures.
Mr. López Obrador has said his government doesn’t plan to go after the cartels, focusing instead on attacking Mexico’s inequality and poverty, which he says feeds the violence. He called his new policy “abrazos, no balazos,” or hugs, not bullets.
The result of previous policies to fight drug cartels was catastrophic, he said on Sunday.
“That strategy left a fearful toll of dead, disappeared and wounded,” he told a crowd that filled Mexico City’s colonial Zocalo square in a mass event marking the first year of his government.
Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com
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