Fifteen people beheaded in Mexico, drug gang suspected

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

By Ioan Grillo

MEXICO CITY | Wed May 9, 2012 6:14pm EDT

(Reuters) - Police found the decapitated and dismembered bodies of 15 people near Mexico's second city Guadalajara on Wednesday, in what appeared to be the latest atrocity by the country's most brutal drug cartel.

Believed to have been carried out by the Zetas gang, it was one of the biggest mass beheadings in the recent history of Mexico, where decapitations have become alarmingly common.

The bodies and heads were stuffed into two vehicles abandoned on the side of a highway in the small town of Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos, said Tomas Coronado, chief prosecutor for the state of Jalisco.

Some of the bodies had been refrigerated before they were dumped, Coronado said.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/09/us-mexico-drugs-idUSBRE8481IM20120509

[DaveJ]

1. Question: Were drugs and violence interwined 50 years ago?

The only reason I ever did drugs was to experience peace and expand my mind, while listen to the Moody Blues and finding new secret messages on their album cover.



Stuff like this is a buzz kill.

[freshwest]

4. 1962? Not that I recall except for heroin dealers fighting each other, long before cocaine was chic.

There was heroin chic, but cocaine was glamorized in Hollywood. Then the cartels got big. There was so much money to be made, the ruthless ones could literally buy up areas and fight their governments. I'm talking eighties.

People snorting it were partying and those who got it with crack were going to prison. The violence of the people on it rivaled what we hear about with meth addicts. Pot was long considered an ethnic thing, that became a symbol of being against the government, etc.

This was before the privatized prison industry became one of the fastest growing things on the stock market. Not having been intimately involved in this, that's just what I remember. People didn't think about it much in 1962. Some used pot between getting their heroin fixes, but alcohol was something they used for the same reasons. There was more in the news about people getting killed form bad heroin in the early sixties.

Some people don't see any difference between heroin, pot and cocaine. But you can grow pot, the others require a network to produce. That is possibly some of the resistance to legalization, that people don't know the difference.

I believe what's going on in Mexico now is mainly due to the loss of the middle class there, not drugs. In the sixties people crossed the borderand no one cared how long they stayed if they were from Mexico. No hysteria over illegal immigration.

When the middle class, such as it was, of educated and skilled workers and businesses in Mexico collapsed, people had to come to the USA to make money to support their families back home. Now these cartels are taking advantage of all of that. If there were another commodity for them to fight over the gangs would sell that.

I don't believe it has to do with drugs, that's just the colorful excuse for the fact that the economy in Mexico has been in trouble for a long time. We've had areas of this country where turf wars have cost lives as well. I see this is a reflection of poverty and not drugs.

If your question was not rhetorical I've answered it the best I can. If it was just an expression of wonder over this, then you won't read what I wrote. That is my recollection as having been old enough and lived in a border state in those years. Just MHO. n/t

[XemaSab]

5. You can technically grow opium in your yard

but you have to have a LOT of poppies to get a decent crop.

[freshwest]

9. Of course, but that's no one's business anymore than growing pot at home. The violence is about..

Business and money. The heroin trade in Asia has been going for centuries. It'll keep going long after we're gone. There are political links to the trade as there always when there's money, and the effect on governments. The world's most profitable businesses were once said to be oil, drugs and the sex trade. Things always happen around that.

Going back to the sixties, there was propaganda about pot. I remember my high school class being called to the auditorium and there were a thousand students, laughing their butts off when the police played a film and tried to tell us about the dangers of the killer weed.
Reefer Madness, I think it was, pretty campy film.

We knew heroin was dangerous and that it was highly addictive, so people avoided it. People where I lived didn't get involved in the stuff for medicine, they got into it to get high. So it was an optional thing and a social thing. But there wasn't a lot of money involved.

[crunch60]

10. I have always thought Alcohol to be the most dangerous drug, kills you, just slower. Insidious and

deadly. (I'm not talking about a glass of wine with dinner) type drinker.

[al bupp]

7. Ha, you and me, bro

Back in the day, I always liked them best through the headphones.

[20score]

2. It's time the prohibitionists in the US had to own these atrocities.

At least partially.

How long are we going to allow this kind of thing to go on down there? WTH?

[guss]

3. Iraq and mexico

When we went to war in Iraq, one of the lines selling the war was they used a soccer field to behead inoccent people. plus tossing babys out of incubaters in Kuwait. but when horrible stuff is happing outside our borders its their problem why? The congress might get fracking pac pocket money if we worked mexico. sorry i that i might be bitter over forein relations but i cant understand why when we cracked down on illigals picking our fields, build a fence and now there is chopped up body parts littering all of Mexico. To me it seems we did not have this horror when we allowed a half open border. now all the ugly is on us.

[XemaSab]

6. I don't even know why Mexican pot is even a thing any more

It's already the largest cash crop in Northwestern California, which is a depressed area.

Why not legalize the stuff, tax it, and end the war on pot?

It would kill like 8 birds with one stone.

Frankly, the older I get the more I think all drugs should be legal. If I wanted to go buy any drug, from pot to meth to heroin to crack, I bet I could buy any of that stuff within a mile of my house. Hell, the guy next door grew weed last year and the house on the other side was boarded up for being a meth house.

What would ending prohibition do? Make it so I could buy any drug I wanted within a half mile of my house? BFD.

[EFerrari]

8. You're so right.

There's probably everything in the mile between here and Safeway.

[IamK]

11. they counted the ears and divided by 2... n/t

[flamingdem]

12. Also, just heard on Pacifica that 3 journalists were just killed in Veracruz

due to the Narcos

[Comrade Grumpy]

13. El blog del narco catalogs the atrocities on a daily basis.

www.blogdelnarco.com

Warning: It's gruesome, in that particularly Mexican fashion. Like !Alarma! times a hundred.

It looks like the killings were the work of the Zetas, in retaliation for the Sinaloa cartel's handiwork in Nuevo Laredo last week, where they hung nine people from a bridge and decapitated 14 others. Nuevo Laredo is Zetas territory, and Chapo Guzman wants it. Jalisco is long-time Sinaloa cartel territory.

A lot of tit for tat killing going on down in Sinaloa too, supposedly between what's left of the Beltran Leyva boys and their ex-partners, the Sinaloa cartel.

These guys are the Frankenstein's monsters of drug prohibition.

[flamingdem]

14. Looks like you've been reading the blog

What's your take on whether the narcos are growing in strength?

[Comrade Grumpy]

15. I don't know that they're growing in strength, but...

their ability to run the drug business and spread mayhem seems undiminished after five years of Calderon's drug war. The authorities have killed or arrested dozens of cartel capos, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. And the population of impoverished young people in Mexico provides an endless supply of cartel cannon fodder.

And the killing seems to be going on at about the same pace as last year, when about 15,000 people died. At least that seems to be leveling out, although having only 15,000 killed each year in the drug wars doesn't seem like much to write home about.

[tawadi]

16. Some of the bodies had been refrigerated before they were dumped

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-rt-mexico-drugs-update-1-pixl1e8g9iai-20120509,0,2790417.story

Guess the Zetas wanted to make a statement. And they did.