The official didn’t release the contents of the note, or give a motive for the killings. But the city across the border from Laredo, Texas has recently been torn by a renewed turf war between the Zetas cartel, a gang of former Mexican special-forces soldiers, and the powerful Sinaloa, which has joined forces with the Gulf cartel, former allies of the Zetas.

Local media published photos of the nine bloodied bodies, some with duct tape wrapped around their faces, hanging from the overpass along with a message threatening the Gulf cartel.

Interior Secretary Alejandro Poire met with Tamaulipas Gov. Egidio Torre Cantu on Friday and agreed to send more federal forces to the state, according to a statement from Poire’s office.

Nuevo Laredo was the site of a 2003 dispute between the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels that set off a wave of violence that has left thousands dead and spread brutal violence across Mexico. That year, then-Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas was arrested and accused drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, sensing weakness , tried to move in on Nuevo Laredo, unleashing a bloody battle.

The city of tree-covered plazas and hacienda-style restaurants was transformed as the Zetas, then working as enforcers for the Gulf cartel, and Sinaloa cartel fighters waged battles with guns and grenades in broad daylight.

Killings and police corruption became so brazen that then President Vicente Fox was forced to send in hundreds of troops and federal agents, and the only man brave enough to take the job of police chief was gunned down hours after he was sworn in.

The Zetas won that fight and have since since ruled the city with fear, threatening police, reporters and city officials and extorting money from businesses. They broke off their alliance with the Gulf cartel in 2010, worsening the violence across northeast Mexico.

But last month, 14 mutilated bodies were found in a vehicle left in the city center. Some media outlets reported that the Sinaloa cartel took responsibility for those bodies and in a message allegedly signed by its leader, Guzman, said the group was now back in Nuevo Laredo “to clean” the city.

Then it all fell apart.

A series of gaffes and mishaps in the opening days of the relentless three-month march to the election halted Vazquez Mota’s rise in the polls against Enrique Pena Nieto, the charismatic, 45-year-old candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Her momentum lost, Vazquez Mota is now as much as 20 points behind Pena Nieto in many polls, weighed down by voter fatigue over economic hardship that some blame on President Felipe Calderon, also of the National Action Party, and his administration’s grueling, nearly six-year-old war against drug cartels.

The candidate notes that polls still show about a fifth of voters still undecided.

“The goal is to go for a sector of important indecisive voters who will really define this election,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We began 40 points behind and we will make a sweep and overcome and get a very good victory.”

Accustomed to winning and working so hard she has made herself sick at times, Vazquez Mota has bounced back from plenty of setbacks throughout her political career. But if the poll numbers hold, a landslide defeat would deal a painful blow to a woman who’s carved out an unusually powerful position in a culture still imbued with machismo.

Mexican women have voted since 1953, but unlike other Latin American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Chile, Mexico has never elected a woman president.

In a particularly bitter assessment by a fellow PAN member, former President Vicente Fox, who first recruited Vazquez Mota as a Cabinet member, proclaimed last month that “only a miracle” could save her race for the presidency.

It isn’t just Fox. The entire political machine that brought Vazquez Mota, 51, into politics as an appointed member of Congress is being blamed for what many see as her likely defeat.

Some critics say divisions and disorganization within the PAN caused the logistical slipups in the campaign’s opening days. Vazquez Mota has also struggled to reconcile voters’ desire for change with the baggage of the ruling party’s two consecutive presidential terms, in particular the offensive against drug cartels many blame for unleashing violence that has claimed more than 47,000 lives over the past six years.

She picked the single word “Different” as her slogan, then pulled veterans of Calderon’s administration into her campaign after it ran into trouble. At some events, she has been confronted by voters angry about her party’s past actions — run-ins broadcast over and over on TV.

“It seems to me that the fundamental problem is an identity crisis and that Josefina Vazquez Mota simply reflects that the party has lost the idea of what it’s trying to achieve,” said Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez, a newspaper columnist and law professor who has closely followed her career and the PAN’s fortunes.

Fox compares the party’s strategy to a poorly trained athlete trying to compete in the Olympics.

“I believe in miracles,” he said at a Wednesday meeting with foreign correspondents. “Sometimes you can flip a tortilla. But days are running out and I see fewer chances for a miracle to happen.”

While hesitating to blame sexism for her poor poll numbers, Vazquez Mota said in the AP interview that gender has played a role in her troubles. She said she’s been asked if she could serve as commander in chief while suffering from menstrual cramps, or have the strength to take on criminals.

“They’d never ask a man the questions that they ask me,” she said.

The fourth of seven children of a Mexico City paint-store owner, Vazquez Mota trained as an economist and by the late ’90s had become a newspaper business columnist. She was known mostly for her book with the deliberately provocative title “Dear God, Please Make Me A Widow,” advocating independence as the best way for women to realize their full potential.

A devoted Roman Catholic who friends say attends Mass every Sunday, Vazquez Mota met her first boyfriend, Sergio Ocampo, as a high school student, married him and had three daughters. He is an executive at major tortilla maker Maseca and often attends campaign rallies with the couple’s children.

Only three months after being named in 2000 to a congressional seat controlled by the PAN, Vazquez Mota was recruited by Fox to be assistant secretary of social development and education, taking responsibility for disaster response and poverty-fighting efforts.

In 2002, she was hospitalized for a week with symptoms of dehydration and exhaustion after rushing to the Yucatan Peninsula to coordinate the rescue and emergency relief effort for 300,000 people made homeless by Hurricane Isidore. Three years later, Vazquez Mota lived for nearly four weeks on a military base in the state of Chiapas after Hurricane Stan hit that region, while other officials stayed in a hotel.

“I’ve always put myself intensely into my work,” Vazquez Mota said.

In 2006, she joined the presidential campaign of Economy Secretary Felipe Calderon and, after he won, was named education secretary, the first woman to hold the important position.

Her political fortunes dropped when she clashed with another of Mexico’s most powerful women, Elba Esther Gordillo, a Calderon ally who controls a key voting bloc as head of the national teachers union.

A witness who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to release the information said the dispute began when Vazquez Mota mocked Gordillo for offering Hummer sport utility vehicles to leaders in her union. The clash is cited as the main reason Calderon demanded Vazquez Mota’s resign in 2009, a firing seen as humiliating. Witnesses recall seeing Vazquez Mota’s legs trembling so much she had to sit down as Calderon announced her resignation.

“Calderon’s team treated her badly. They were extremely sexist,” said Xochitl Galvez, a former commissioner for Indian affairs who became a close friend of the candidate. “It was one of her toughest moments.”

Vazquez Mota recovered quickly, winning election to a congressional seat months later, then took a leave of absence to run for her party’s presidential nomination.

By the beginning of March, one poll had Vazquez Mota within 7 percentage points of Pena Nieto, and some were anticipating a close race. That didn’t happen.

In one speech, she mistakenly said she planned to “strengthen money laundering” if elected. The next day, a campaign rally had to be called off because of a nearby, unrelated picket line of striking airline workers — a cancellation her staff blamed on poor planning.

Shortly after, following a moderate earthquake that swayed the capital’s high-rises, Vazquez Mota said she felt faint during a speech and interrupted her address to sit down and rest. The campaign dismissed the episode as a brief spell of low blood pressure, but images of her looking ill dominated television news for several days.

Known for speaking off the cuff for more than a half hour straight, Vazquez Mota is placing her comeback bets on two debates with Pena Nieto and leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The front-runner has hewed tightly to his campaign script and been prone to gaffes when improvising.

Despite the long odds, Vazquez Mota and her staff are still hopeful.

“It hasn’t been easy for her,” said Agustin Torres, the social-networking coordinator for her campaign. “She’s overcome many obstacles, and right now I see her going, and going, and not stopping.”

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Adriana Gomez Licon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/agomezlicon

The killings have shocked the copper mining village of Nacozari, on the edge of the Sierra Madre, and may be the first ritual sacrifices linked to the popular saint condemned by the Roman Catholic Church.

Authorities say the throats and the wrists of the victims were cut with knives and axes, and their blood was spread on a Santa Muerte altar. Their bodies were then buried near the shacks where the alleged cult members lived.

“We never knew they were part of a Santa Muerte cult,” said Jorge Sanchez Castillo, a 54-year-old hotel owner who has a corn field next to the house of the woman believed to lead the group. “This has been a tragic thing for all of us.”

Nacozari has been spared the grisly violence of drug cartels fighting for lucrative corridors along the U.S.-Mexico border, said police chief Jose Miguel Espinoza.

“It was a peaceful town. We’d never seen such violence,” he said.

When a 10-year-old boy went missing in July 2010, his mother and her boyfriend told police that acquaintances had seen him begging in the streets of nearby Agua Prieta across the border from Douglas, Arizona, and that they would go find him, said Espinoza.

“We had no reason to suspect it was a homicide,” he said.

A second 10-year-old boy went missing in early March, prompting Sonora state’s missing persons unit to send agents to Nacozari, said the police chief. That boy’s mother and her boyfriend reported it to state authorities, who discovered weeks later that the two boys knew people in common.

The missing boy Martin Rios was the son of the ex-girlfriend of a man named Eduardo Sanchez. The second boy, Jesus Martinez, was the step-grandson of Eduardo Sanchez’s new girlfriend Silvia Meraz.

The police chief said both boys would often visit Meraz’s home in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the town of 11,500.

Espinoza said his officers suspected the house was being used for prostitution after seeing different men from out of town visiting, but never gathered enough evidence to arrest anyone.

Agents on Wednesday unearthed the body of the boy Jesus Martinez buried in the dirt floor in the bedroom of one of the Meraz daughters. They then began arresting family members, who led them to what agents believe are the remains of the other boy, as well as the grave of 55-year-old Cleotilde Romero, a close friend of Meraz who disappeared in 2009.

Jose Larrinaga, spokesman for the Sonora Attorney General’s Office, said the 44-year-old Meraz, who police suspect was the cult leader, and seven people related to her, were detained pending further investigation: her boyfriend Eduardo Sanchez, father, son, three daughters and a daughter-in-law. No formal charges have been filed pending further investigation.

“They thought that by offering the blood, they would be protected for some time,” Larrinaga said. “According to them, Santa Muerte was going to tell them where the money was. They all identify themselves as fanatic followers of Santa Muerte.”

R. Andrew Chesnut, chairman of Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of the book “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint,” said there have only been unconfirmed reports of human sacrifices related to the figure in Mexico in recent years.

Chesnut said the 2007 shooting deaths of three men appeared to be related to Santa Muerte because the bodies were abandoned at a shrine to the figure outside the border city of Nuevo Laredo. But they showed no signs of being sacrificial killings.

He said that although most Santa Muerte devotees consider killing a “Satanic aberration of devotion,” and that books about the Santa Muerte don’t mention human sacrifice, some followers are extreme.

“With no clerical authority to stop them, some practitioners engage in aberrant and even abhorrent rituals,” Chesnut said.

Police paraded the eight people arrested in the case of the cult killings into the prosecutor’s offices in the state capital of Hermosillo on Friday to allow journalists to view and question them, a typical practice in Mexico.

Meraz told reporters she has believed in Santa Muerte for more than two years.

“Santa Muerte was going to offer us money,” Meraz said.

Asked if she thought she had received anything, she answered with a profanity, her voice breaking: “What can she give you? Nothing.”

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Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon reported from Mexico City.

Follow Adriana Gomez Licon at www.twitter.com/agomezlicon

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has repeatedly called for Cassez to be freed, while Mexican President Felipe Calderon has urged the court panel to uphold justice for victims.

Cassez’s case “simply holds up a mirror to practices of our justice system,” said Ana Laura Magaloni, dean of legal studies and the Center for Economic Research in Mexico City.

Cassez was arrested in 2005 and convicted of helping a kidnapping gang allegedly led by her then boyfriend that kept victims at the compound where she was living on the outskirts of Mexico City. She has denied involvement and said she didn’t know victims were being held there.

At least one victim identified her as one of the kidnappers, though only by her voice, not by sight.

Cassez’s imprisonment became a hotly debated issue in France after Mexican police acknowledged they staged a televised raid of the ranch in which officers appeared to rescue the hostages and detain Cassez. The Attorney General’s Office acknowledged that, in fact, Cassez had been arrested the day before outside the ranch.

Police later acknowledged they were dressed in civilian clothing and were let into the ranch by Israel Vallarta, Cassez’s ex-boyfriend who was also arrested.

Mexican police hauled her back to the ranch and forced her to participate in their staging of the raid for television cameras, a sort of media display that is not unusual in Mexico.

Supreme Court judge Arturo Zaldivar cited that incident and other irregularities when he proposed this month that Cassez should be set free. He said police also were late in allowing her access to the French consul.

A panel voted 3-2 against freeing her but four also said there were violations to her rights and that the case needs to be reviewed. A new judge will now have to present a proposal that considers what effects those violations had on her case. That will be voted on by a panel of five judges.

“It’s a great step to have the justice system recognize that the case has not been fair, that there were very grave violations” said Cassez’s lawyer, Agustin Acosta.

Zaldivar’s proposal divided a country that is struggling to repair a legal system that routinely shrugs at torture or tramples on the rights of defendants but that also is fed up with rampant drug violence and kidnappings.

For Miguel Sarre, a law expert at Mexico’s Autonomous Institute of Technology, the justices missed an opportunity to send a message to police, prosecutors, and judges who botch cases without consequences.

“It was an opportunity to send a message to authorities and say that cases like this one can’t be presented to society but instead they came up with lukewarm resolution,” Sarre said. “The justices who voted against this proposal didn’t dare to judge the judicial bodies they were part of until recently.”

Federal figures show kidnappings have at least doubled since 2007, with 1,152 reported between January and November of 2011, though the number is likely much higher. Most kidnappings in Mexico still go unreported.

A widely viewed documentary film, “Presumed Guilty,” last year detailed the story of a man arrested off the street and held for several years for a murder he didn’t commit.

At the same time, a recent study at the Tec de Monterrey university found that 98 percent of crimes reported never end in verdicts. Most crimes in Mexico still go unreported for lack of confidence in the system.

When a woman in the border state of Chihuahua was gunned down in the street while protesting the release of a man accused of killing her daughter, national outrage was so strong that the judges involved were suspended.

Various public opinion polls say 65 to 74 percent of Mexicans think Cassez is guilty and many express resentment at French pressure to win her freedom.

Still, some defend Zaldivar’s push to uphold the letter of the law as a protection for all defendants.

“If this is allowed to stand, we are all at risk,” Miguel Carbonell, a legal expert from Mexico’s National Autonomous University, said recently of the Cassez conviction.

But many believe any violation of due process was not serious enough to let Cassez go free.

Jose Cuitlahuac Salinas, Mexico’s deputy prosecutor for organized crime, said last week Cassez did receive assistance from her consulate and that the reenactment was justified because it was for “the public broadcasting of an issue of national interest.”

Mexico in 2008 implemented a judicial reform that called for open trials and reinforced the principle of innocence until proven guilty. The old system, still in place in most of the country, was blamed for fostering corruption and confessions extracted by torture.

Cassez was sentenced in 2008 to 96 years in prison for four kidnappings. The sentence was reduced to 70 years a year later when she was acquitted of one of the charges.

Early last year, a court rejected a plea to dismiss the charges and confirmed the 60-year sentence.

The case of her former boyfriend, Israel Vallarta, is still being decided in the courts.

Luis de la Barreda, director of the Citizens Institute for Crime Research, said last week the Cassez case presents a fundamental dilemma.

“Not a single kidnapper should be set free,” he said, “but neither do I wish that a single innocent person be behind bars, as a scapegoat, as a victim of social vengeance.”

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Follow Adriana Gomez Licon at www.twitter.com/agomezlicon