Thread: Mass graves in Mexico reveal new levels of savagery

Mass graves in Mexico reveal new levels of savagery

By Nick Miroff and William Booth
Sunday, April 24, 11:47 AM

SAN FERNANDO, Mexico -- At the largest mass grave site ever found in Mexico, where 177 bodies have been pulled from deep pits, authorities have recovered few bullet casings and little evidence that the dead were killed with a gun.

Instead, most died of blunt force trauma to the head, and a sledge hammer found at the crime scene is believed to have been used in the executions, according to Mexican investigators and state officials.

As many as 122 of the victims were passengers dragged off buses at drug cartel roadblocks on the major highway to the United States.

The sadistic murders of hundreds of civilians at isolated ranches 90 minutes south of the Texas border mark a new level of barbarity in Mexico’s four-year U.S.-backed drug war.
As forensic teams and Mexican marines dig through deeper and darker layers here, the buried secrets in San Fernando are challenging President Felipe Calderon’s claims that his government is winning and in control of its cities and roads.
More than 35,000 people have been killed, and thousands more have simply disappeared, since Calderon sent the military to battle Mexican organized crime with $1.6 billion in U.S. support. U.S. officials in Mexico worry that criminal gangs are taking over sections of the vital border region not by overwhelming firepower but sheer terror.
On Thursday, cartel gunman sacked the city of Miguel Aleman, across the river from Roma, Texas, tossing grenades and burning down three car dealerships, an auto parts outlet, furniture store and gas station. Three buses were strafed with gunfire Saturday in separate attacks, wounding three.
The U.S. State Department issued new warnings Friday advising Americans to defer non-essential travel to the entire border state of Tamaulipas and large swaths of Mexico due to the threat of armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping and murder by organized crime.
In the red dirt tombs of San Fernando, almost all of the bodies were stripped of identification, meaning no licenses, bus ticket stubs, photographs of loved ones, according to interviews with local and state officials, making the job of notifying next of kin especially difficult.
Forensic photographs shown to The Washington Post depict mummified bodies caked in dirt and badly decomposed, with signs of extreme cranial trauma. In the largest two graves, holding 43 and 45 bodies, the corpses were piled atop one another in a 10-foot-deep pit dug by a backhoe, that criminals filled over the last four months.
The red nail polish on a young victim’s toe stands out in one photograph, along with her XS-size undergarments.
Officials in Tamaulipas say they have found 34 grave sites scattered in a wide arc around this farming town of 60,000, where Mexican marines last week established a military camp for ground and helicopter patrols.
Evidence suggests the dead include Mexicans and Central American migrants traveling to the United States to work. Only a few of the exhumed bodies have been identified, including a local car salesman, a federal social worker and a Guatemalan immigrant.
Authorities have arrested 76 suspects, including local Zeta boss Martin “El Kiloâ€

Police, bus companies failed to act as graves filled in Tamaulipas

There were clues but nothing was done, and now at least 177 bodies have been unearthed. Demand grows for dismissing the state's elected but apparently ineffective officials.

Reporting from Matamoros, Mexico

Suitcases started piling up, unclaimed, at the depot where buses crossing northern Tamaulipas state ended their route. That should have been an early clue.

Then the bodies started piling up, pulled by forensic workers from two dozen hidden graves in the scruffy brush-covered ravines around the town of San Fernando, 80 miles south of this city that borders Brownsville, Texas.

At least 177 corpses have been recovered in the last few weeks, most of them, officials now say, passengers snatched from interstate buses, tortured and slaughtered. Women were raped before being killed, and some victims were burned alive, according to accounts from survivors who eventually overcame their fears and came forward.

The slayings have horrified a Mexican public already awash in violence and led commentators to call them "our Auschwitz" and a "Mexican genocide."

Worse yet is the realization that the killing in Tamaulipas state has been going on for months — including the brutal slayings of bus passengers — and no one, not the bus companies, nor the police, nor the officials in charge, acted to stop it.

Elida Martinez, a gray-haired woman in her 60s, was one of dozens of mothers, fathers and siblings of the missing who were waiting in the morgue here the other day to offer blood samples for DNA testing.

Two of her daughters disappeared in February, one kidnapped from the hotel in San Fernando where she worked and the other seized from her home in the middle of the night a short time later. Between them they left behind four children.

"You pray to God you won't find them here," she said. Yet the gut-wrenching uncertainty tears her apart. "You don't sleep. You can't work. You live in anguish."

After the massacre last year of 72 mostly Central American immigrants near San Fernando, the government of President Felipe Calderon promised the world, including angry Central American authorities, that justice would be done and the popular routes through northern Mexico toward the United States would be guarded.

It now appears, however, that the killings continued, and not just of immigrants but Mexican citizens and, perhaps, a handful of Americans. On Wednesday, authorities said they had rescued a group of 68 Mexicans and Central Americans who had been seized by gangsters from buses or from bus stations in the same area.

The motives behind the bus kidnappings remain unclear. Gangs may seize the passengers hoping to extort money from them, to forcibly recruit them or because they are searching for rivals.

The killings have galvanized an unusual if belated consensus, even among conservative commentators and politicians, that parts of Mexico have indeed been lost to criminal gangs such as the Zetas and the Gulf cartel that control (and are battling each other to dominate) the northeast. What does it mean, they ask, when the federal government cannot keep the nation's highways safe from brazen predators?

Even worse is the near-certainty that the police who are meant to be protectors have been involved. Among the more than 50 people arrested in connection with the latest killings are 17 local police officers accused of providing protection to the cartel gunmen believed responsible.

There is growing demand for a new government strategy and that the national Senate take the highly unusual step of dismissing the state's elected but apparently ineffective officials, a move that would also involve Calderon suspending civil rights in the region.

"If Tamaulipas is not a failed state, or a narco-state, it sure looks like one," political analyst Alfonso Zarate said. "The institutional powers are incapable of upholding the law."

Calderon has steadfastly resisted that characterization.

The top official in Tamaulipas is something of an accidental governor. Egidio Torre Cantu was elected last year, standing in at the last minute after his brother, a shoo-in for the job, was assassinated by a drug gang.

"We are prisoners in towns that we cannot leave," said Mario Alberto Alejandro, 43, who came to the morgue looking for his brother, Rigoberto, a U.S. citizen who vanished Feb. 23 on the road to Matamoros. "In whose hands are we?"

Alejandro echoed other families in saying authorities were giving them the runaround, sending relatives from the morgue to one government office after another and even in some cases to Mexico City, where most of the bodies have been taken, in part because the Matamoros morgue was full.

Alejandro said his brother Rigoberto has lived for 13 years in Texas, where he works as a forklift operator. He was in Tamaulipas to visit family, a trip he makes often.

"He never thought it would be this dangerous," Alejandro said. "There is no security."

So many families have shown up at the Matamoros morgue that locals set up a tent with chairs and a table offering coffee and water. Doors have been plastered with dozens of pictures of missing people.

Francisco Garcia's nephew Jose was on his way to Chicago from central Mexico when last heard from in early March. He was traveling with two friends, who are also missing, and all were going to join family in the U.S.

"We have not received any information, no phone call asking for ransom, nothing," said Garcia, a farmer. Too terrified to travel to Matamoros, Garcia was among scores of people who instead went to the morgue in Mexico City.

"Jose is just gone."

The Times reported in early March that several thousand people have disappeared since Calderon launched the crackdown on drug gangs in December 2006. Most vanished without a trace. Families nurse the hope that their loved ones were taken as forced laborers on marijuana farms or in meth labs. But the mass graves, here in Tamaulipas and in other parts of the country, are slowly destroying those hopes. At least 58 bodies were recovered last week from clandestine graves in Durango state.

The main bus companies that run through Tamaulipas have altered their schedules and eliminated nighttime trips through San Fernando. But they have not spoken publicly about the killings. One manager, speaking through a representative but insisting on anonymity, confirmed the existence of unclaimed suitcases but would not discuss why authorities were not informed about them.

"Maybe it's fear, or they didn't want to lose the business," said Jose Javier Saldana, a regional human rights official. "Maybe the drivers didn't report it up the chain [of management], either."

Although some of the families said the bus companies' failure to sound the alarm was unconscionable, most put the blame on authorities. Several families said authorities tried to pressure them not to speak to reporters. Furthermore, officials in three central states, Guanajuato, Queretaro and San Luis Potosi, say they have been asking the Tamaulipas government about numerous missing citizens as far back as 2009.

In the San Fernando case, in addition to the police officers, the arrested include Martin Omar Estrada, a.k.a. "El Kilo," whom authorities describe as a ringleader responsible for the latest dead as well as last summer's migrant massacre. If true, that means Estrada, who was arrested this month, and his gang continued to operate with impunity for months.

Calderon recently promised to take back Tamaulipas and flood the zone with troops. It was virtually the same promise he made five months ago.

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