Meanwhile, in another part of Mexico, an angry crowd beat and hung five suspected kidnappers, leaving some of their bodies dangling from trees. In 2012, the Zetas drug cartel dumped 49 decapitated bodies on a highway in northern Mexico, and that same year they strung nine bodies from an overpass and left 14 severed heads near the city hall. In 2011, the then-smaller Jalisco cartel dumped 35 bodies on an expressway in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz. Instead, the gangs went to great lengths to hide bodies, by creating clandestine burial pits or dissolving corpses in caustic chemicals.īut the Jalisco gang, which has gained a reputation for directly challenging authorities, appears to have returned to showy killings as a way to intimidate rivals. “Unfortunately, this conflict results in these kinds of acts that justifiably alarm the public.”įor years, Mexican cartels had seemed loath to draw attention to themselves with mass public displays of bodies. “Certain criminal gangs are fighting over territory, to control activities related to drug production distribution and consumption,” López Solís said. The state attorney general said the killings discovered Thursday appeared to be part of a turf war. In one particularly brazen attack in May, a convoy of pickups and SUVs openly marked with the letters “CJNG” – the Spanish initials of The Jalisco New Generation Cartel – drove through the city of Zamora, Michoacan, at night, shooting up police vehicles and killing or wounding several officers. “This kind of cynical impunity has been increasing in Michoacan,” Hope added. “This kind of public, theatrical violence, where you don’t just kill, but you brag about killing, is meant to intimidate rivals and send a message to the authorities,” said Mexico security analyst Alejandro Hope. “Be a patriot, kill a Viagra,” the banner read in part. While the banner was not completely legible, it bore the initials of the notoriously violent Jalisco drug cartel, and mentioned the Viagras, a rival gang. Some were hung with their hands bound, some with their pants pulled down. Two of the bodies hung by ropes from the overpass by their necks, half naked, were women, as was one of the dismembered bodies found in the city of Uruapan, Michoacan Attorney General Adrián López Solís said at a news conference. The killing spree reported by prosecutors in the western state of Michoacan marked a return to the grisly massacres carried out by drug cartels at the height of Mexico’s 2006-2012 drug war, when piles of bodies were dumped on roadways as a message to authorities and rival gangs. Just down the road were three more bodies, for a total of 19. MEXICO CITY: Mexican police found nine bodies hanging from an overpass yesterday alongside a drug cartel banner threatening rivals, and seven more corpses hacked up and dumped by the road nearby.
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