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As agents clear out Mexican gangs, more brutal ones move in
Washington Times ^ | April 7, 2010 | Jerry Seper

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.

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.

....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.

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.

....the cartels have increased their efforts to recruit gang members along the southwestern border, including U.S. citizens who are a particularly valuable asset ....

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2489809/posts