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Mexican drug cartels' new scare tactic: beheadings
- Dane Schiller, San Antonio Express-News
Tuesday, September 26, 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.