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Los Zetas deny 49 dead in Cadereyta were theirs

For a map, click here. For a map of Zacatecas state, click here. To read the Rantburg.com story on the 49 individuals found butchered in Cadereyta, Nuevo Leon on Mother's Day, click here. To read the Rantburg.com report on the connection between the Cadereyta massacre and the massacre in Jalisco state days before, click here.

By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com

Messages appearing in the Mexican state of Zacatecas claim that the Los Zetas criminal organization is not responsible for the 49 individuals found butchered along a highway near Monterrey on Mother's Day, according to web news reports.

The blankets with messages painted on them, colloquially known as narcopintas or narcomantas claim responsibility for two other mass murders, a Mexican Mother's Day massacre in a remote community south of Guadalajara in Jalisco state May 9th, and a number of killings in Nuevo Laredo in Tamaualipas state 10 days ago. The messages appeared in Zacatecas, Fresnillo, Guadalupe and Jerez early Tuesday morning, but were quickly removed by local police.

A story by this writer appearing in Borderland Beat and in Rantburg.com Sunday said that evidence from web and private sources pointed to a Los Zetas plan for a massive Mother's Day display of brutality against Los Zetas opponents. Like the 18 dead found in Jalisco state, at least some of the victims were probably innocents who were kidnapped, tortured to death, then transported two days before their discovery to Cadereyta.

Los Zetas, and an alliance of Gulf Cartel and Sinaloa Cartel have been in a death grip since 2010. Both sides use innocents, such as migrants and other random individuals to torture and kill in a gruesome manner for bloody displays meant to terrorize the other, while claiming, falsely, the victims were operatives from the rival gangs. Instead of terrorizing one another, criminal gangs instead wind up terrorizing the general populace.

The messages posted in Zacatecas state demanded that security forces investigate the crime in Cadereyta. The messages claim misspellings of Gulf cartel names in a second set of messages left at the scene of the Cadereyta massacre are evidence that Los Zetas did not commit the crime.

However, anonymous sources have responded by asking how the second set of messages were known if Los Zetas did not write them. The contents of the second set of narcopintas were withheld from the public.

Los Zetas have decentralized criminal operations with plaza bosses who act independently. Often, one hand does not know what the other is doing. The mass murders in San Fernando municipality in Tamaulipas state between August 2010 and the summer of 2011, which claimed the lives of 193 individuals, is a very good example.

That Los Zetas group killed a number of individuals when the plaza boss caught wind that the Gulf Cartel was bringing up shooters from the south. A number of those victims were innocents transiting between Reynosa on the border and Ciudad Victoria and Tampico in the south.

Uncredited reports at the time said the Los Zetas effort was a recruiting drive where women were sequestered, raped, then murdered, and the remaining men were pitted, one against the other for the right to survive as a shooter for Los Zetas.

Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news fro Rantburg.com
Posted by: badanov 2012-05-16
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=344768