As agents clear out Mexican gangs, more brutal ones move in

The bodies that turned up on a squalid back street in the border town of Reynosa in December were no longer human. The torsos showed deep lacerations and punctures; the severed heads were badly beaten and mutilated. Crudely butchered limbs lay scattered across the tarmac stained by blood.

“See. Hear. Shut up, if you want to stay alive,” read a note written - like so many others - in block letters on a splattered poster board.

Violence fueled by the illegal drug trade has long been a daily fact of life along the U.S.-Mexico border. But as the Mexican and U.S. governments have made significant inroads in dismantling an older order of drug cartels, their rivals and even newer ones have moved to fill the vacuum - and fill it in increasingly terrifying and barbarous ways.

The savagery began in earnest in 2006 in the city of Uruapan in the Mexican state of Michoacan, about 100 miles southeast of Guadalajara, when drug gang members stormed into the Sol y Sombra discotheque and dumped the decapitated heads of five rival cartel members onto a white tile dance floor - shocking people throughout Mexico.

Beheadings and dismemberments have since become the cartels’ signature crime - to punish those who oppose or betray them, to establish their turf, to terrorize the citizenry against testifying against them, and to press community and political leaders to collaborate.

Heads, torsos and severed legs and arms have been strewn along city streets throughout Mexico, mostly in border towns where the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels are in a pitched battle against each other and with Los Zetas, a former Mexican military group, for control of the multibillion-dollar drug industry.

Four severed heads have been found by Mexican authorities in the past two weeks, and dozens of people have been decapitated in recent months. Sometimes, the heads are lined up neatly in rows, displayed along with banners designed to intimidate enemies, rivals and police.

Aping Iraqi militants

Beheading was a lesson the drug smugglers learned after watching Iraqi insurgents carry out videotaped beheadings, Mexican Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said during a 2007 news conference after the discovery of one of the first severed heads.

Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr., who has experienced the border violence firsthand, said his department started seeing beheadings in Mexico about a year after the videotaped beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Pakistan.

“Terrorists from the Middle East brought this practice to Central America then to Mexico. It is also a practice of the [violent U.S. street gang known as] MS-13,” Sheriff Gonzalez told The Washington Times. “They are getting worse and worse. It never stops shocking me.

“I am even more nervous about this practice spilling over into U.S. cities,” he said, noting that Mexican drug cartels are now operating in more than 200 American cities. “What a shame.”

Sheriff Gonzalez founded the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition, which sought help from the federal government to control growing violence along the 1,200-mile Texas-Mexico border. Overwhelmed by a flood of illegal immigrants and increasing violence, the coalition said the federal government’s failure to control the border had forced county law enforcement authorities into a “financial nightmare.”

The coalition has since expanded to become the Southwest Border Sheriff’s Coalition. It now includes 28 sheriffs’ departments along the border in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

Zapata County, with about 13,000 residents, is about 50 miles south of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where killings by the drug cartels have been rampant. Sheriff Gonzalez has fewer than two dozen deputies to patrol nearly 1,000 square miles, including 60 miles of the border.

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