Human heads dumped at Nuevo Laredo city hall as part of gruesome display of power by warring cartel
The bodies of 23 people have been found hanging from a bridge or decapitated and dumped near city hall in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo, where drug cartels are fighting a bloody and escalating turf war. It follows the discovery in Veracruz of four journalists’ bodies in a canal.
Authorities found nine of the victims, including four women, hanging from an overpass leading to a main highway, said a Tamaulipas state official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Hours later police found 14 human heads inside coolers outside city hall along with a threatening note. The 14 bodies were found in black plastic 
bags inside a minivan abandoned near an international bridge, the official said.
The official provided no motive for the killings. But the city across the border from Laredo, Texas, has recently been torn by a renewed turf war between the Zetas cartel, a gang of former Mexican special forces soldiers, and the powerful Sinaloa cartel, which has joined forces with the Gulf cartel, former allies of the Zetas.
Local media published photos of the nine bloodied bodies, some with duct tape wrapped around their faces, hanging from the overpass along with a message threatening the Gulf cartel: “This is how I will finish all the fools you send.”
via Bodies hung from bridge as 23 more die in Mexico drug war | World news | guardian.co.uk.
Mexico journalists tortured and killed by drug cartels
Gabriel Huge, Guillermo Luna and Esteban Rodriguez must have hoped they would be spared. Until last year, the three had been members of a tight band of journalists covering the drug war that has swamped the Caribbean port city of Veracruz.
Huge and his nephew Luna had worked on the local newspaper Notiver, Rodriguez with a rival publication, Diario AZ; but all three resigned in July after four of their colleagues were killed – one of them with his wife and one of his children.
The three photographers fled the city after hearing that their names were also on a hitlist, but soon returned. Luna came back last year and started working again at the Veracruz News, and Huge returned this year, as a freelancer, avoiding the crime beat. Rodriguez decided that enough was enough. He got a job with the electricity commission, according to Luna’s mother, Mercedes Varela.
On Thursday night, their bodies were pulled from a canal behind a sewage plant with that of a fourth victim, Irasema Becerra, who reportedly worked as a secretary at a local paper. They had been tortured.
from the guardian, u.k.
