MEXICO CITY - Police found 17 bodies stuffed in cars or dumped on streets in garbage bags across Mexico on Monday in the latest wave of violence apparently triggered by warring drug gangs.

Police forensics experts examine a vehicle that was abandoned in the resort city of Cancun, Mexico, Monday, April 16, 2007. [AP]

In the resort city of Cancun, the bodies of three men and two women were found in an SUV with their heads covered in tape and their hands bound behind their backs, Quintana Roo state police said.

Police spokesman Antonio Coral said he could not immediately confirm the cause of death.

Mexico City police found three more bodies in an SUV parked in a middle-class neighborhood in what the Mexico City attorney general said appeared to be killings linked to a turf war between drug gangs.

Two more bodies were found in a car in Iguala, about 100 miles south of Mexico City. A note found at the scene threatened Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the alleged head of the Sinaloa Cartel who escaped from a federal prison in 2001.

Three burned bodies also were found in two cars in the Sinaloan city of Culiacan, while four more bodies were found in garbage bags in the central city of Taxco and the port city of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico.

Federal investigators say the Sinaloa cartel is fighting a bloody turf war with the Gulf Cartel and their army of enforcers known as the Zetas over billion-dollar drug trafficking routes to the United States. The battle has led to beheadings, grenade attacks and execution-style killings across Mexico and the violence has taken a particularly heavy toll on police.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who took power in December, has launched a nationwide offensive against the gangs, sending 24,000 federal police and soldiers to areas ravaged by violence.

But killings have continued unabated. According to a tally kept by Mexico City daily El Universal there have been more than 700 drug slayings since January.

The federal government blames some local police for being on the pay roll of drug cartels.

On Monday, federal agents detained more than 100 state and municipal police in the northern city of Monterrey and are investigating them for links to traffickers.

Mexico's Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said the US needs to do more to stop guns and drug money heading south fueling Mexican drug violence. The vast majority of arms used by the soldiers of drug cartels are smuggled from the US, he said.

Analysts estimate that Mexican drug gangs make between $10 billion and $30 billion a year selling cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine to the US market, rivaling the money Mexico makes from oil exports and foreign tourism.