Arrests led Mexican authorities to grisly discovery

[Angelhair]

.MEXICO CITY - The buses crawled to a halt to obey roadblocks manned by armed men, who boarded like soldiers or police doing an inspection. One by one, they tapped certain passengers, all men, mostly young, to get off: "You. You. You."

Relatives and travel companions watched in horror as the buses pulled away without them, Tamaulipas officials quoted surviving bus passengers as saying.

Less than two weeks later, security forces following reports of abducted passengers in violent Tamaulipas state bordering Texas stumbled on a collection of pits holding a total of 59 bodies.

Federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire announced Thursday that a total of 14 suspects linked to the killings had been arrested between Friday and Wednesday. Those arrests apparently led authorities to the pits.

Poire said the suspects belonged to a "criminal cell," but he did not specify which gang or cartel they may have belonged to. He said the government is now placing a special emphasis on dismembering "the most violent gangs," but he did not specify which ones they were.

The grisly discovery this week came in virtually the same spot near the town of San Fernando where 72 migrants were murdered in August.

The United States' top drug enforcer said in Mexico a day earlier that the violence means authorities are winning.

By Thursday, investigators had identified a few victims of the latest massacre as Mexicans, not transnational migrants trying to reach the U.S. They did not say if they were connected to 12 official missing-person reports from the buses. Authorities interviewing witnesses calculated that 65 to 82 people went missing, Tamaulipas state Interior Secretary Morelos Canseco said.

They were kidnapped on one of Mexico's most dangerous stretches of highway that runs along Mexico's Gulf Coast to the border with Texas, an area where federal authorities launched a major offensive in November seeking to regain control of territory from two warring drug gangs, the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas.

Despite an estimated 1,000 soldiers in Tamaulipas, criminals have become so brazen they apparently kidnapped dozens of passengers in a stretch of open desert that locals say lay between two military checkpoints. The Mexican military would not comment on the location of roadblocks for security reasons.

Authorities speculate the men pulled off the buses fell victim to ever more brutal recruiting efforts to replenish cartel ranks. But one local politician said there were rumors that the Gulf Cartel was sending buses of people to fight the Zetas, who control that stretch of road and who began boarding buses in search of their rivals.

The Zetas are blamed for the migrant killings last August as well as the death of U.S. Immigration and Customs agent Jaime Zapata in neighboring San Luis Potosi state.

More than four years and tens of thousands of troops into Mexico's crackdown on drug trafficking, authorities say they have the cartels encircled. More than 34,600 people have died in drug violence. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administrator Michele Leonhart told an international drug conference in Mexico's resort city of Cancun this week that the violence is an unfortunate symptom of success.

Arrests led Mexican authorities to grisly discovery

 

[WillowTree]

And the whole wide world just ignores this shit.

 

[waltky]

More bodies found in mass graves...

Mexico Finds 28 More Bodies in Border Pits
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - Mexican investigators have found a total of 116 bodies in pits near the U.S. border, 28 more than previously reported, Attorney General Marisela Morales said Tuesday.

Morales said a total of 17 suspects tied to the brutal Zetas drug gang have been detained in relation to the killings in the northern state of Tamaulipas, some of whom have purportedly confessed to abducting passengers from buses and killing them. President Felipe Calderon said a 19-year-old man who is among the detained confessed to killing more than 200 people. Calderon gave no other details.

Interior Secretary Francisco Blake Mora pledged to step up the presence of troops and federal police in the area where the killings occurred and not leave the area until the killers and drug gang members there have been caught. "Organized crime, in its desperation, resorts to committing atrocities that we can't and shouldn't tolerate as a government and as a society," Blake said.

The graves were found earlier this month in the township of San Fernando, the same area of Tamaulipas where investigators found the bodies of 72 migrants massacred by suspected drug cartel gunmen last August. Most of the 72 migrants were Central Americans, who frequently travel through the area to reach the United States.

Police say witnesses in the latest killing case have told them that gunmen pulled the victims, mostly young men, off passenger buses traveling through the San Fernando area in late March. Authorities blame the abductions on the Zetas drug gang, the same group accused in the migrant killings. The motive for the bus abductions remains unclear, though prosecutors have suggested the gang may have been forcefully recruiting people to work for it.

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[waltky]

16 Police Arrested In Connection To Mass Graves...

Violence increases pressure on Calderon
Thursday, April 14,`11 — The mass killing, mass graves and mass arrests of police this week in northeastern Mexico have shaken the government of President Felipe Calderon, who faces mounting pressure to stem sensational violence.

Sixteen police officers from the town of San Fernando have been detained on suspicion of protecting the Zetas criminal gang, which is alleged to have filled mass graves with dozens of bodies found there, according to Mexican officials who announced the arrests Wednesday night. In yet another case of alleged police complicity in murder, authorities found the bodies of four men detained three weeks ago in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. The men disappeared in the system after they were arrested by a special forces unit of municipal police. Their bodies, showing signs of torture, turned up in the high grass at a ranch Wednesday.

Four years into his U.S.-backed, military-led war against drug cartels, Calderon’s government is struggling to make good on promises to transform the state and local police forces, whose officers are often ill trained and poorly paid. These same units often work for crime mafias and drug traffickers. Calderon’s opponents in the Mexican congress have blocked his efforts to place local police under state control. Authorities searching shallow pits in San Fernando, about 90 miles south of Brownsville, Tex., said they found 23 more corpses Thursday, bringing the total to 145 since the first were uncovered last week.

On Thursday, investigators began moving the overflow to morgues in Mexico City to help with identifications. Locals have dubbed the main artery between the Tamaulipas state capital, Ciudad Victoria, and Brownsville as “the highway of death.” Bus companies have canceled travel, and the few Mexican journalists who have ventured into San Fernando arrived with military escorts. Investigators suspect that some of the victims were pulled off buses by gunmen who had set up roadblocks. In a video clip by the newspaper El Universal, witnesses describe women being dragged away and raped. Travelers are advised to drive a circuitous route hundreds of miles to the west to the reach the border.

Responding to protesters who have criticized the government for failing to reduce the carnage, Calderon has called on citizens to rally together under the banner “Ya basta!” — roughly “enough is enough.” The president warned that his critics should be attacking the true source of violence, the criminals, and not the government or armed forces. The response from opponents was lukewarm. Jorge Carlos Ramirez Marin, a federal deputy and leader of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, said, “Enough is enough — this strategy isn’t working and must be changed. The words of the president sound nice, but they are useless.”

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Mexican drug cartels targeting and killing children
Saturday, April 9,`11 — On a sunny afternoon last week, when the streets of this mountain mining city were filled with schoolchildren and parents hurrying home from work, gunmen entered a tiny apartment and started firing methodically.

The assassins killed everyone: the family matriarch and her adult son; her daughter and son-in-law, and finally, her 22-month-old granddaughter. The child was not killed by mistake. Preliminary forensics indicate that the gunmen, unchallenged, pointed a pistol at Scarlett Ramirez and fired. In Mexico’s brutal drug war, children are increasingly victims, innocents caught in the crossfire, shot dead alongside their parents — and intentionally targeted. According to U.S. and Mexican experts, competing criminal groups appear to be killing children to terrorize the population or prove to rivals that their savagery is boundless, as they fight over local drug markets and billion-dollar trafficking routes to voracious consumers in the United States.

“It worries us very much, this growth in the attacks on little children. They use them as a vehicle to send a message,” said Juan Martin Perez, director of the Child Rights Network in Mexico. “Decapitations and hanging bodies from bridges send a message. Killing children is an extension of this trend.” The children’s rights group estimates that 994 people younger than 18 were killed in drug-related violence between late 2006 and late 2010, based on media accounts, which are incomplete because newspapers are often too intimidated to report drug-related crimes. Few of the crimes are solved. “What worries us is the impunity in all of these cases,” Perez said. “If there is impunity, this use of children to send messages will grow.”

Government figures include all homicides of people younger than 17, capturing victims whose murders might not have been related to drugs or organized crime. In 2009, the last year for which there is data, 1,180 children were killed, half in shootings. Recent, sensational killings of children — shot in a car seat, dumped in a field with a bullet in the head, killed as their grandmothers cradled them — have shocked Mexicans and shaken their faith that family is sacred, even to the criminal gangs. “Before, they went after their enemy. Now, they go after every member of the family, indiscriminately,” said Martin Garcia Aviles, a federal congressman from the Party of the Democratic Revolution from the state of Michoacan. A Chihuahua state police commander was attacked as she carried her 5-year-old daughter to school two weeks ago. Both died of multiple gunshot wounds.

In February, assassins went hunting for a Ciudad Juarez man, but the intended target wasn’t home, so they killed his three daughters instead, ages 12, 14 and 15. In March, a young woman was bound and gagged, shot and left in a car in Acapulco. Her 4-year-old daughter lay slumped beside her, killed with a single bullet to her chest. She was the fifth child killed in drug violence in the resort city in one bloody week. “They kill children on purpose,” said Marcela Turati, author of “Crossfire,” a new book on the killings of civilians in Mexico’s drug war. “In Juarez, they told a 7-year-old boy to run, and shot his father. Then they shot the little boy.”

Once off-limits

 

[waltky]

New security chief in Tamaulipas...

Mexican state replaces security chief
Tue, Apr 19, 2011 - MASS GRAVES:Tamaulipas’ governor appointed a former military captain who has been working with the federal police to better coordinate beefed-up security efforts

Mexico’s Tamaulipas State governor replaced his public security chief on Sunday after 145 bodies showed up in mass graves in the violent border state in the last two weeks. Tamaulipas Governor Egidio Torre Cantu said in a statement that he tapped former military Captain Rafael Lomeli Martinez as the new chief because his experience in the military and with the federal police would help him coordinate beefed-up security efforts announced by federal and state authorities last week.

The outgoing chief, retired Brigadier General Ubaldo Ayala Tinoco, offered the governor his resignation in light of the new security efforts, saying Torre Cantu should have the opportunity to choose the leader, Tamaulipas Secretary-General Morelos Canseco said. “The new appointment is very simple,” Canseco said. “It is part of a commitment by Tamaulipas to strengthen the state’s contribution toward an integrated public security strategy based mainly on coordination among federal, state and municipal authorities.”

Lomeli, who has worked in Tamaulipas in the past, most recently coordinated Federal Police efforts in Nuevo Leon, a neighboring state also racked by violence from the warring Gulf and Zetas drug cartels. Authorities in Tamaulipas began uncovering bodies in mass graves early this month following reports that passengers were being pulled off buses at gunpoint in the township of San Fernando. As of last week, 145 bodies had been found in 26 graves. Fernando is the same place where 72 Central and South American migrants were found slaughtered in August.

Both mass killings have been blamed on the Zetas. Only one body has been identified, that of a Guatemalan man. Authorities have yet to say whether dozens of bus passengers reported missing were found in the graves.

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[Tank]

All coming to a town near you.

 

[waltky]

Granny says it just goes to show dem Mexican drug cartels is nothin' but a bunch o' animals...

Authorities Still Uncovering Bodies in Mexico Mass Graves
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011 - Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales says 183 bodies have been uncovered so far from mass graves in the northeastern part of the country, near the U.S. border.

Morales made the comment Tuesday as she announced that 74 people, among them 17 police officers, have been arrested in connection with the investigation. The corpses were discovered recently around the community of San Fernando, in Tamaulipas, the state where 72 Central American migrants were found shot to death last August.

Authorities have linked Mexico's Zetas drug gang to these incidents. The Zetas started as a Mexican military unit that defected and began working with the Gulf cartel, based in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. The Zetas split from the Gulf cartel last year. The two groups are now fierce rivals.

Elsewhere, investigators also have uncovered bodies from a mass grave in the northern state of Durango. They say that, to date, they have pulled the remains of 75 people from that site. More than 35,000 people have been killed in Mexico's drug-related violence since the end of 2006, when President Felipe Calderon took office and ordered a crackdown on the country's drug cartels.

In a separate development, Mexican police Monday rescued 51 people, including 18 Central Americans and six Chinese, who were kidnapped in northeastern Mexico. Officials say 27 Mexicans were among those rescued. Earlier this month, police freed 68 kidnapped people in Mexico's Reynosa area, across from McAllen, Texas. Authorities have taken four police officers into custody in connection with the abduction of the 68 individuals.

Source

 

[waltky]

Mexican drug cartels fightin' amongst themselves...

Mexico mass graves signal major cartel rift
Tue, May 24, 2011 - DISPUTE:The Sinaloa cartel had seemed immune to the internal power struggles that have plagued other drug gangs — until the discovery of 219 corpses, an official said

The vacant car repair lot hardly looks out of place in a vibrant, but gritty part of the northern colonial city of Durango, famous as the set for John Wayne westerns. Only a closer look reveals the secrets hidden at “Servicios Multiples Carita Medina,” clues to exactly what kind of “multiple services” were rendered. The freshly turned soil is sprinkled with lime to kill the smell and littered with discarded Latex gloves and an empty cardboard box: “Adult Cadaver Bag. 600 gauge, Long Zipper, For Cadavers of up to 75 inches. 15 pieces.” In the most gruesome find in Mexico’s four-year attack on organized crime, police dug up 89 bodies in the repair lot, buried over time in plain sight of homes, schools and stores.

Then, like the killers, authorities left one of Mexico’s most puzzling crime scenes completely open and unprotected. It was the largest of seven graves found in bustling urban areas of the city of almost 600,000, where a total of 219 bodies have been uncovered since April 11. Publicly, authorities say they don’t know who’s inside the graves in a state that was home to Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, but that today is more synonymous with the country’s powerful Sinaloa drug cartel. Officials only say the mass graves probably hold the corpses of executed rivals from other gangs or possibly kidnap victims and even some police.

However, a new and more detailed account comes from a top federal police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security reasons. The official said investigations indicate the grave holds rivals of the Sinaloa cartel and that the once orderly and brutally efficient gang is undergoing a bloody internal power struggle in Durango. The Sinaloa cartel had seemed immune to the kind of missteps, mindless violence and internal power struggles that have plagued other drug gangs, to the extent that most Mexicans believed the Sinaloa cartel was either exceedingly sophisticated or in cahoots with the government.

However, the portrait now emerging from the 219 corpses is of a cartel that is riven by internal cracks, the official said. In recent months, at least two local groups sought to break off from Sinaloa and control the drug shipment routes through Durango for themselves, the official said. A third group, known as the “M’s,” remained loyal to Sinaloa boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who has been named one of the richest and most influential people in the world by Forbes magazine, with a fortune of more than US$1 billion.

A leading member of the “M’s” and the fourth-highest ranking Sinaloa operator in Durango, Bernabe Monje Silva, was arrested by federal police on March 27 and led police to the grave sites, the police official said. Jorge Chabat, a Mexican expert on the drug trade, said that while the Sinaloa cartel is one of Mexico’s most stable gangs, it has had internal divisions, as witnessed several years ago when the Beltran Leyva brothers broke off to form their own cartel. Chabat said disputes like the one in Durango “are part of the jockeying that goes on in the world of drug trafficking,” adding that the split will probably result in increased violence in Durango.

MORE

 

[Jessica Blume]

And the whole wide world just ignores this shit.

Hmm? Ignore what? Oh look! The KARDASHIANS!

 

[waltky]

Body count update...

Toll reaches 226 bodies found in Mexico mass graves
Thu, Jun 02, 2011 - DURANGO - THE number of bodies recovered from mass graves in this northern Mexican city rose to 226, public security officials said Wednesday, updating the toll from 218.

Since the first grave was found on April 11, the military has unearthed six such sites. Last week, they came upon a house in an upper middle class neighborhood filled with six more bodies and on Tuesday, they pulled out two more bodies. A state public security official confirmed to AFP that "226 bodies have now been exhumed." Authorities have yet to attribute the killings to a specific drug cartel.

The number of bodies found in Durango is the largest in a single location in Mexico, surpassing the town of San Fernando in nearby Tamaulipas state where 183 bodies were found spread across 40 graves in killings attributed to the Los Zetas drug gang. A judge meanwhile Wednesday ordered the arrest of 73 people for alleged links to those deaths. The suspects had previously been placed under provisional arrest pending the presentation of evidence by the prosecution before the judge.

Located on major drug trafficking routes, Durango is one of Mexico's most dangerous states. Authorities suspect some drug gang leaders may be hiding there. It has been a battleground for factions of the Sinaloa cartel and, more recently, members of the Zetas drug gang, analysts say. Authorities believe many bodies in the hidden graves were of members of criminal gangs and that police and kidnap victims may be among the dead. The victims are believed to have been killed between four years and four months ago.

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Mexico charges 73 in mass grave find
Fri, Jun 03, 2011 - DRUG CARTEL BLAMED:Several police officers were among the scores of suspects charged over the killings of 183 people whose bodies were unearthed in Tamaulipas

The Mexican government charged 73 suspects on Wednesday in the killings of 183 people whose bodies were recovered during April in mass graves near the US border, prosecutors said. The defendants were booked in different jails while waiting to see a Mexican federal judge, Mexican Attorney General’s Office spokesman Ricardo Najera said. The government had in the past weeks announced the detention of 74 people, including several police officers who allegedly protected gang members, but Najera said no one had been charged until Wednesday. He said more suspects were in custody of the federal government pending charges, but he didn’t know the number.

It wasn’t clear which specific crimes the 73 suspects were charged with, but officials said they were related to the grisly discovery of 183 corpses in San Fernando, a town 137km from the border at Brownsville, Texas. The excavations in the border state of Tamaulipas shocked Mexicans around the country, who filed dozens of missing-person reports as the horrifying tale of the mass graves unfolded. Federal officials said most of the victims were Mexicans looking to migrate to the US in March, but who instead were kidnapped off passenger buses and killed. The government has identified only 12 victims so far — one a Guatemalan man, the rest Mexican.

Authorities blamed the Zetas gang, a drug-trafficking organization suspected of forcefully recruiting migrants to fight the formerly allied Gulf cartel. Those who refused are killed. Mass graves are a common method used by Mexican drug cartels to bury their victims. In the northern state of Durango, authorities have unearthed 226 bodies since April 11 in residential neighborhoods in the state capital, also called Durango. The latest three bodies were removed this week, Fernando Rios, spokesman for the state police, said on Wednesday. Excavations continue.

The mass cases in Tamaulipas and Durango don’t appear to be connected, officials have said. A top federal police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said recently the killings in Durango stem from an internal bloody battle for power within the same gang — the Sinaloa drug cartel. Durango borders the state of Sinaloa, the cartel’s home base, and the gang keeps a strong presence in the vast region close to the Sierra Madre Mountains. In another drug-related incident in the Sinaloa state capital, Culiacan, the army said on Wednesday that soldiers found US$500,000 in cash inside a sport utility vehicle that a drug suspect abandoned alongside a highway.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2011/06/03/2003504882