Mexican cops discover human slaughterhouse in truck

June 16th 2012 · 9 Comments

In yet another grisly find for Mexican authorities, on Tuesday evening police officers discovered at least 14 mutilated and dismembered corpses packed into a large truck abandoned on the median of a highway in Veracruz, a Drug Enforcement Administration source told the Law Enforcement Examiner.

The van was located on the Alamo-Potrero del Llano Highway near the border with Tamaulipas state, the scene of the worst gang wars in northeastern Mexico, according to the DEA source.

The Veracruz General Attorney, Reynaldo Escobar Perez, called in Army and Navy personal to help the police officers remove the bodies and transport them to the federal forensic laboratory. Eventually, the remains were transported to the state capital and Gulf coast port of Veracruz, according to an official statement.

According to the local newspapers, the bodies had been hacked and packed in bags, which made it extremely difficult for law enforcement officers and forensic examiners to count the number of bodies involved and the identities of the victims.

Officials believe this latest bloody massacre is related to a gang war between the organized crime group Los Zetas and the Gulf and Pacific cartels which has been ongoing since 2010, according to a statement.

The DEA source said that drug cartel “enforcers” usually dismember their victims while they are still alive in order to instill terror in the ranks of opposing gangs and the Mexican police and military.

Beginning in October 2011, the Mexican government initiated Operation Safe Veracruz following the discovery of more than 35 bodies found in an area called Boca del Rio, just south of the Veracruz capital in September 2011.

In spite of numerous arrests — including arrests that resulted in suspects being extradited to the United States — drug-related violence throughout Mexico is on the rise, with one of the worst cases occurring on May 13, when police found 50 bodies near the city of Cadereyta, in Nuevo Leon state.

A report and graphic shows that the deadly drug cartel Los Zetas controls criminal activity, drug trafficking, and extortion in over half of Mexico’s territory. The report was obtained by the U.S. National Association of Chiefs of Police.

Cuitláhuac Salinas, head of the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (SIEDO), presented a map at the National Institute of Penal Sciences that illustrates the territories in Mexico controlled by each cartel. Students and lawyers from around the nation attended the event.

The map shows that Los Zetas, which is led by Heriberto Lazcano, alias “El Lazca,” controls most of Mexico’s southern regions as well as the Gulf of Mexico. The cartel has a presence in 17 out of the 31 Mexican states, which is a decrease from the 23 states it operated in during 2008.

A version of this column originally appeared in island-adv.com.