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DI AMERIKA LATIN

Mexico cartel hangs bodies from city bridge in grisly show of force

• Jalisco New Generation cartel claims 19 deaths in Uruapan
• Drug gangs believed to be fighting for control of avocado trade

The crypts of bodies in a separate incident in Guadalajara in 2018. The Jalisco gang appears to have returned to showy killings as a way to intimidate rivals.

 The crypts of bodies in a separate incident in Guadalajara in 2018. The Jalisco gang appears to have returned to showy killings as a way to intimidate rivals. Photograph: Ulises Ruiz/AFP/Getty Images

The merciless dogfight between Mexican drug cartels has produced its latest macabre spectacle with the discovery of 19 mutilated corpses – nine of them hung semi-naked from a bridge – in a city to the west of the capital.

The massacre, in Uruapan 250 miles from Mexico City, was claimed by the increasingly dominant Jalisco New Generation cartel which posted a large white banner beside the dangling bodies of its victims.

“Lovely people, carry on with your routines,” it read, beneath the group’s capitalised red initials, CJNG.

At least 10 other dismembered and bullet-riddled bodies were reportedly found dumped in two nearby locations.

Michoacán state’s attorney general, Adrián López Solís, blamed the killings on a clash between rival cartels battling for control of the region’s drug trade. Troops were being mobilized to investigate the crimes and catch the killers, he said.

Falko Ernst, an International Crisis Group researcher who studies Mexico’s cartels, said this week’s slaughter was clearly intended to intimidate rival criminal groups, the families of their members, as well as Mexican authorities.

Ernst said the bloodbath was partly about the struggle for control of Uruapan’s local drug trade. But a more important motivation was the fight for the region’s billion-dollar avocado industry. “The big magnet here is avocados,” he said.

Ernst said at least three armed groups were currently battling for control of the city of Uruapan – the CJNG, the Knights Templar cartel and Las Viagras, which is part of a larger organization called the the Nueva Familia Michoacana.

Stomach-churning displays of criminal might are not unusual in Mexico, which last year suffered a record 35,964 murders.

But the CJNG has become particularly notorious for its willingness to confront Mexican authorities with brazen public shows of brute force and firepower.

In May video footage emerged showing heavily armed cartel members parading through Zamora, another city in Michoacán, in cars marked with their group’s insignia. The cartel was blamed for a battle with local police that day that reportedly left at least four officers dead.

Uruapan boasts an unenviable place in Mexican drug trafficking lore. It was here, in 2006, that five severed heads were rolled on to a nightclub dancefloor by gangsters – a ghoulish attack that made global headlines and helped trigger then president Felipe Calderón’s catastrophic six-year war on drugs. That failed offensive against the cartels resulted in an unprecedented period of bloodletting, with murder rates soaring across the country almost ever since.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who became Mexico’s president last December, swept to power promising to rethink his country’s fight against crime. He created a new security force called the national guard and vowed to tackle the social roots of crime by offering scholarships to disadvantaged teenagers.

But eight months into López Obrador’s presidency there is no sign of improvement. Official figures show there were at least 17,608 murders in the first half of the year.

La Voz de Michoacán, a local newspaper, said that this year, as armed groups battled for supremacy there, Michoacán state had found itself at the eye of the storm with 963 killings since January.

Even Mexico City – long seen as a island of relative calm from the conflict – has seen a surge in crime this year.

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