Mexican drug cartels' new scare tactic: beheadings
Pastor Dale Morgan
Mexican drug cartels' new scare tactic: beheadings*
Dane Schiller, San Antonio Express-News
September 29, 2006
(09-26) 04:00 PDT Mexico City -- To send a chilling message to their
underworld rivals, Mexican drug cartels are adopting a method of
intimidation made notorious by Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
Already this year, at least 26 people have been decapitated in Mexico,
with heads stuck on fences, dumped in trash piles and -- most recently
-- tossed onto a nightclub dance floor.
Although beheading goes back centuries as a form of execution, it has
become the latest tactical escalation of a turf war that gets nastier
all the time, with hit men looking for new ways to instill fear.
"Before, they tortured the hell out of people, but they didn't throw
their heads out in public," said James Kuykendall, a retired U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration agent.
Why this form of murder and mutilation is being used now is anyone's guess.
Beheadings have had a high international profile in recent years, as the
tool of radical Islamist groups that release videos of hostages being
executed.
In Mexico, as crime bosses fall and turf shifts, the pattern of killing
is changing.
The infamous Gulf and Sinaloa cartels and their smaller offshoots are
fighting for control of smuggling routes from the southern border with
Guatemala to the northern border with the United States.
"It is clearly a message for the living. What they are trying do with
these beheadings is leave an impression on their enemies," said Jorge
Chabat, a Mexico City analyst who studies drug trafficking. "This is a
sign the war is spreading and it is getting more horrible."
Police, wise guys and lawyers are among the dead, but most of the
victims remain unidentified. Some were blindfolded or showed signs of
torture.
The boldest strike came this month when five heads were scattered on the
dance floor of a bar in the state of Michoacan -- a region west of
Mexico City notorious for drug trafficking.
"The family does not kill for pay, does not kill women and does not kill
innocents," read a handwritten sign left beside the heads. "The only
ones who die deserve to die, and all the people know that this is divine
justice."
Saying the attacks were too delicate a topic, Mexican police and federal
prosecutors refused to discuss the beheadings in more than the most
general terms.
They point to the Zetas -- a group of highly trained Mexican army
deserters -- and the Maras -- Central American gangsters known for their
brutality and extravagant facial tattoos -- who work for the cartels as
hit men.
No arrests for the killings have been announced. Beheadings reportedly
have occurred in the states of Guerrero, Michoacan, Baja California and
Nuevo Leon.
The crimes are every bit as chilling a calling card as the old
"Colombian necktie," used by cartels in that country, which involved
slicing a person's throat and pulling the tongue through the wound.
Mexico's first narco-decapitation came in April in Acapulco. The heads
of two police officers were stuck in plastic bags and mounted on a fence
that surrounds government offices.
The cartels are saying there is now a higher price to pay than the
traditional gangster death for opposing them, said Bruce Bagley, a
University of Miami analyst who studies Latin American drug traffickers.
"Filling people full of bullets is old hat -- this has really been an
attention-getter and it has clearly scared the hell out of people," he
said.