CADEREYTA, Mexico – Authorities struggled Monday to identify 49 bodies without heads,hands or feet to gain clues into the latest in a series ofmassacres from an escalating war between Mexico's two dominant drugcartels, with increasing evidence that innocents are being pulledinto the bloodbath along with gang rivals. More than 24 hours after the gruesome discovery, officials had yetto identify any of the mutilated corpses found near the northernindustrial city of Monterrey. None of the bodies examined so farshowed signs of gunshots, Nuevo Leon state security spokesman JorgeDomene told Milenio television. Though it was unclear who the victims were, it was the fourthmassacre in a month. Mexico's interior secretary, Alejandro Poire,said Monday that all those incidents resulted from the fightbetween the Zetas gang and the Sinaloa Cartel, which have emergedin the last year as the two main forces in Mexican drug-traffickingand other organized crime.
Some victims in earlier body dumps have turned out to be bakers,brick layers, even students — anyone who could be snatchedoff the streets in mass killings that one captured gang member saidwere designed to "cause terror." Poire would not respond directly when asked by The Associated Pressif innocents have increasingly become targets. "We don't have proper identification of the dead," he said. "Wehave to leave that to the investigation." "We have to look deeper ... to know the motives or who could havebeen the victims of violence," Poire added.
The 43 men and six women found Sunday were dumped at the entranceto the town of San Juan in the municipality of Cadereyta about 105miles (175 kilometers) southwest of McAllen, Texas. Graffiti around the town of 4,000 people mark it as Zetasterritory, including "100% Zeta" painted on a stone arch welcomingvisitors where the bodies were dumped and "Z's" painted on the homeof San Juan's priest. There have been 74 killings in the first four months of this yearin Cadereyta municipality, compared to 27 over the same period in2011 and seven in 2010, according to figures from Nuevo Leon stateprosecutors. The massacre follows the discovery of 14 men left in a van indowntown Nuevo Laredo on April 17 and 23 people found hanged ordecapitated in the same border city May 4.
Eighteen dismembered bodied were left near Mexico's second-largestcity, Guadalajara, last week. Among the nine people identified inthat attack were bricklayers, waiters and at least one student.None had criminal records. Accused Zetas member Juan Carlos Antonio Mercado was arrested nearGuadalajara last week in the kidnapping of 12 people. He toldreporters that he and accomplices had been kidnapping people sincemid-April at random and held them with the intent of dumping theirbodies in the city center on May 10, Mexican Mother's Day, but thepolice presence kept them from doing so.
Prosecutors in Jalisco state, where Guadalajara is, said thekidnapping plot fell apart when some victims escaped. The plotappeared to be linked to the discovery of the 18 dismemberedbodies. Drug violence has killed more than 47,500 people since PresidentFelipe Calderon launched a stepped-up offensive when he took officein December 2006. The campaign has seen the two cartels emerge asMexico's two most powerful. At least one of the two cartels ispresent in nearly all of Mexico's 32 states.
Their war started in earnest last fall with the dumping of 35bodies in Veracruz, a strategic smuggling state with a giant Gulfport formerly controlled by the Zetas and recently taken over by agang loyal to Sinaloa. Guadalajara has long been controlled by gangs loyal to Sinaloa.Nuevo Laredo and Monterrey are considered territory of the Zetasgang, which was founded by deserters from the Mexican army'sspecial forces as the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel thathistorically dominated northeastern Mexico and the border alongTexas. The groups split in early 2010, causing a bloody battle forterritory that the Zetas have been winning. The weakened GulfCartel has started to align itself with Sinaloa to fight back.
Poire wouldn't say which side was responsible for Sunday'skillings, though Domene said Sunday that it was the Zetas. A state police investigator at the morgue, who spoke on conditionof anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case,said some of the bodies were badly decomposed and some had theirwhole arms or lower legs missing. San Juan, part of the Cadereyta municipality, is a town of farmersand factory workers near a refinery for Pemex, Mexico's state-runpetroleum company. One resident who didn't want to be identified for fear ofretaliation said that the municipality has been without a localpolice for six years and that the Zetas have controlled San Juanfor at least two years. He said he believed that the Zetas' enemies, who he wouldn't name,dumped the bodies as a way to provoke authorities into crackingdown on the Zetas.
By Monday afternoon, both state police andMexican soldiers were patrolling the town. It's a common tactic, known as "heating up the plaza," for drawinglaw enforcement to disrupt the activities of a cartel's rival inits home territory, said Alejandro Hope, a security analyst andformer official in Mexico's CISEN intelligence agency. "It puts the authorities in a reactive mode," Hope said. ___ Associated Press writers Michael Weissenstein in Mexico City andPorfirio Ibarra Ramirez in Cadereyta contributed to this report. I am a professional writer from Agriculture, which contains a great deal of information about boil crab legs , steamed crab legs, welcome to visit!
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