Nine people, including three children aged 12, 13 and 14, have been killed when gunmen opened fire in a video game arcade in western Mexico.

Prosecutors in the state of Michoacan said late Monday the attack left two other people wounded.

The four gunmen were apparently searching for specific targets, but then opened fire indiscriminately on customers. Two of the victims were aged 17 and 18.

The attack occurred Monday in the city of Uruapan, where violence has reached shocking proportions.

Over the weekend, investigators also found the decomposed bodies of 11 people in clandestine graves in Uruapan.

Prosecutors said they were investigating a missing person case when they received a tip about the clandestine burial pits.

And on Friday in Uruapan, gunmen attacked a municipal police patrol, killing one officer and wounding two others.

That attack may have been retaliation for the Friday arrest of a Viagras gang leader who has been implicated in 19 murders.

Turf wars between the Jalisco and Viagras drug cartels, as well as predecessors, have bloodied the city for several years.

Quick Guide Mexico's evolving war on drugs Show Calderón sends in the army Mexico’s “war on drugs” began in late 2006 when the president at the time, Felipe Calderón, ordered thousands of troops onto the streets in response to an explosion of horrific violence in his native state of Michoacán. Calderón hoped to smash the drug cartels with his heavily militarized onslaught but the approach was counter-productive and exacted a catastrophic human toll. As Mexico’s military went on the offensive, the body count sky-rocketed to new heights and tens of thousands were forced from their homes, disappeared or killed. Kingpin strategy Simultaneously Calderón also began pursuing the so-called “kingpin strategy” by which authorities sought to decapitate the cartels by targeting their leaders. That policy resulted in some high-profile scalps – notably Arturo Beltrán Leyva who was gunned down by Mexican marines in 2009 – but also did little to bring peace. In fact, many believe such tactics served only to pulverize the world of organized crime, creating even more violence as new, less predictable factions squabbled for their piece of the pie. Under Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, the government’s rhetoric on crime softened as Mexico sought to shed its reputation as the headquarters of some the world’s most murderous mafia groups. But Calderón’s policies largely survived, with authorities targeting prominent cartel leaders such as Sinaloa’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. When “El Chapo” was arrested in early 2016, Mexico’s president bragged: “Mission accomplished”. But the violence went on. By the time Peña Nieto left office in 2018, Mexico had suffered another record year of murders, with nearly 36,000 people slain. "Hugs not bullets" The leftwing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in December, promising a dramatic change in tactics. López Obrador, or Amlo as most call him, vowed to attack the social roots of crime, offering vocational training to more than 2.3 million disadvantaged young people at risk of being ensnared by the cartels.

“It will be virtually impossible to achieve peace without justice and [social] welfare,” Amlo said, promising to slash the murder rate from an average of 89 killings per day with his “hugs not bullets” doctrine. Amlo also pledged to chair daily 6am security meetings and create a 60,000 strong "National Guard". But those measures have yet to pay off, with the new security force used mostly to hunt Central American migrants. Mexico now suffers an average of about 96 murders per day, with nearly 29,000 people killed since Amlo took office.

In August, Jalisco cartel gunmen left nine bodies hanging from an overpass, with seven more corpses hacked up and dumped by the road nearby. Just down the road were three more bodies, for a total of 19. They hung a banner from the overpass threatening the Viagras.

Uruapan is where many believe Mexico’s 2006-12 drug war began in September 2006, when armed masked men burst into a bar there and tossed five severed heads on to the dance floor, along with written threats to rivals.