MEXICO CITY – Four decapitated and mutilated corpses were strung from a bridge in a popular resort town outside the Mexican capital on Sunday, the latest atrocity as the country fights an escalating drug war.
The bodies of the four young men were discovered early on Sunday, hung upside down by their feet from a bridge near a wealthy area of Cuernavaca, a leafy city about an hour outside Mexico City, where many of the nation’s elite own homes.
The victims’ genitals, index fingers and heads had been cut off, according to a statement from the attorney general’s office in Morelos state, which includes Cuernavaca.
Their heads and genitals were found nearby, along with a handmade sign, the statement said.
“This will happen to everyone that helps the traitor Edgar Valdes,” the placard read, referring to a top gang leader whose actual name is Edgar Valdez. It was signed CPS, the initials for the South Pacific Cartel, a relatively new drug gang that has claimed responsibility for other gruesome killings.
Drug violence has escalated across Mexico as President Felipe Calderon goes after powerful cartels and as rival gangs fight over smuggling turf. More than 28,000 people have died in drug-related violence since Mr Calderon took office in late 2006.
While much of the bloodshed is centred in northern Mexico, violence has also come to Cuernavaca, a once quiet colonial city, since security forces killed a top drug lord, Arturo Beltran Leyva, in a shoot-out there in December.
His death kicked off a power struggle within his cartel, and rival gangs have been seeking to co-opt his territory.
Valdez, a Mexican-American known as “La Barbie” due to his blond hair, is a leading contender to head the Beltran Leyva cartel.
A spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office said the murdered young men appeared to have been small-time local drug dealers.
In Ciudad Juarez, meanwhile, the notoriously violent city on Mexico’s border with the United States, a gun battle prompted US border patrol agents and police to shut a thoroughfare on the El Paso side of the border. – (Reuters)