Mexican Drug cartels using terrorist beheading tactics

Mexican Drug cartels are ordering decapitations blind folding and hooding victims before they shoot them. The Cartels are sending a chilling message to the Mexican President Felipe Calderon Administration by adopting methods of intimidation made notorious by Middle Eastern terrorist groups. New Terrorist Bases South Of The Border
At least 40 people have been decapitated in Mexico so far this year, with heads stuck on fence posts, found in trash bags and heads being tossed onto a nightclub dance floor for all to see. Mexican drug cartels and terrorist are recruiting for more fighters to train as soldiers
The Felipe Calderon Administration has said the wave of bloodshed knows no politics; it is ravaging state governments controlled by each of Mexico's three major parties. He singled out Mexico City and the northern states as being especially hard-hit.
"It seems to me that drug violence has overwhelmed the governments of the PAN, the PRI and the PRD," Calderon said in a radio interview.
He says murder and mayhem fueled by drug smuggling have overwhelmed the governments of the nation's capital and key states across the country.

The PAN is the ruling National Action Party, while the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, controlled Mexico's presidency from 1929 until losing to President Vicente Fox in 2000. In the July 2 presidential election, Calderon, of National Action, barely beat leftist former Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD, or Democratic Revolution Party.

Calderon called for legislative and law-enforcement efforts to curb drug violence across party lines "in a very coordinated way."

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City has long expressed concern about the growing wave of violence along the northern border, where people are gunned down with automatic weapons almost daily, and dozens of Americans have been kidnapped held for ransom and some killed. Americans Being Kidnapped, Held and killed in Mexico
Authorities say more than 3,500 people have died in Mexican drug violence in the last year.

Narcotics investigators on both sides of the border attribute the spike in killings to a territorial war between drug gangs battling for control of lucrative smuggling corridors into the United States.


But U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza recently extended warnings to say Americans should use extreme caution when traveling anywhere in Mexico.

"The bottom line is that we simply cannot allow drug traffickers to place in jeopardy the lives of our citizens and the safety of our communities," Garza said in a statement Sept. 14.

Drug related killings in Mexico that have included beheadings which have occurred in Guerrero, home to the Pacific resort of Acapulco, Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and in Calderon's native Michoacan state, in central Mexico west of the capital.

Masked gunmen burst into a seedy nightclub in the Michoacan city of Uruapan, fired guns in the air and rolled five severed human heads onto the dance floor.


The gunmen left scrawled notes on pieces of cardboard, a tactic that has suddenly become common in Michoacan and elsewhere. The notes made reference to "the Family," while other beheadings in Acapulco and elsewhere have referenced the letter "Z," suggesting the involvement of "Las Zetas," a group of former elite Mexican soldiers now working as hit men for the Gulf drug cartel. They're known as "Los Zetas

On Tuesday, police recovered the body of a man who had been shot 24 times with machine guns in the Michoacan city of Turicato. Messages had been attached to the unidentified, 35-year-old victim's body, including "Anti Z" and "greetings, Z family. This is for the traitors to their country," the government news agency Notimex reported.

Investigators say Michoacan is a base for powerful cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine smugglers with ties to some of the countries largest and most-violent drug gangs.
The U.S. and Mexican border cities have jumped in gang-related killings since the beginning of the year. The Mexican government has described the violence as revenge for President Felipe Calderón's year-old crackdown on organized crime that sent thousands of soldiers and federal police into violence-plagued Mexican cities bordering the United States.
The government reports that Mexican drug cartels and gangs operating along the Southwest border are more sophisticated and dangerous than any other organized criminal enterprise. The Mexican cartels, and the smuggling rings and gangs they leverage, wield substantial control over the routes into the United States and pose substantial challenges to U.S. law enforcement to secure the Southwest border. The cartels operate along the border with military grade weapons, technology and intelligence and their own respective paramilitary enforcers.
Recently Mexican troops where sent to CD. Juarez Mexico across from El Paso Texas to stop the drug related violence. This latest Mexican troop movement places more than 30,000 Mexican troops combating the Mexican cartels throughout the country. This operation, dubbed Operación Conjunta Chihuahua, by the Mexican army is expected to provoke a violent response from Mexican drug cartels, officials said. The U.S. placed Mexico under a travel alert As Thousands of Armed Mexican Troops Patrol the Streets of Juarez