Mexico's violence intensifies, becomes more gruesome
from Brownsville, Texas, by the Mexican military.
The Zetas may benefit from his death in the short term. Zeta was the radio call sign that the Mexican police in the 1980s used to locate high ranking battalion commanders. Now it is the name of a paramilitary cartel that poses a significant threat to south Texas. About 200 of these former Mexican Special Forces gone rogue were trained by U.S. Army Special Forces at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the early 1990s.
The cartel’s origins were confirmed in a video sent to the Dallas Morning News in 2005, in which two men identified themselves as former Special Forces who moonlighted by recruiting from the Mexican Special Forces for the cartels.
Beheading: the cartels’ preference execution method
The preferred form of cruelty by drug cartel henchmen is to capture enemies and behead them, a once-shocking act that has now become numbingly routine.
Since 22 March, authorities have come across four separate grisly scenes of beheaded bodies, in one case with several heads placed neatly in a row.
Dozens of people have been decapitated in recent months, most of them apparently members of rival drug gangs locked in turf battles over narcotics routes, betrayals of loyalty and territorial influence.
Tim Johnson writes for McClatchy Newspapers that decapitations by drug cartels in Mexico first began in 2006, and that year armed thugs swaggered onto the white tile dance floor of the Sol y Sombra discotheque in Uruapan, a town in Michoacan state, and dumped five heads from plastic garbage bags.
Decapitations emerged alongside another gruesome tactic — dumping the bodies of rivals in vats of acid. Cartel goons have moved away from that method, however. “Dissolving the bodies in acid didn’t bring them the same spectacular results,” said Arturo Arango Duran, a security consultant in Monterrey, the industrial and business hub in the nation’s north, referring to media coverage. “This is all part of a plan to use publicity to control territory through terror.”
Experts suggest that the drug gangs have several motives. First, they seek to use beheadings to cow the citizenry from squealing on them and to pressure local authorities to collaborate. Second, the gangs try to out-macho each other with greater acts of macabre violence, frightening rivals in a murderous spiral.
The pace of drug-related violence is quickening. March was the bloodiest month yet with 958 deaths, El Universal newspaper reported Thursday. Since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006, confronting drug cartels, 28,757 people have died, it said.
“They are plumbing the depths of brutality now — the beheading of people, dissolving people in acid, doing the massacres in addiction centers, you know, throwing peoples’ bodies in ditches,” said Bruce Bagley, an expert on narcotics trafficking at the University of Miami.
