19 found hanged or hacked up in Mexican gang war

MEXICO CITY — Mexican police found nine bodies hanging from an overpass Thursday alongside a drug cartel banner threatening rivals, and seven more corpses hacked up and dumped by the road nearby. Just down the road were three more bodies, for a total of 19.

The killing spree reported by prosecutors in the western state of Michoacan marked a return to the grisly massacres carried out by drug cartels at the height of Mexico’s 2006-2012 drug war, when piles of bodies were dumped on roadways as a message to authorities and rival gangs.

Two of the bodies hung by ropes from the overpass by their necks, half naked, were women, as was one of the dismembered bodies found in the city of Uruapan, Michoacan Attorney General Adrián López Solís said at a news conference.

The victims had been shot to death. Some were hung with their hands bound.

“This kind of public, theatrical violence, where you don’t just kill, but you brag about killing, is meant to intimidate rivals and send a message to the authorities,” said Mexico security analyst Alejandro Hope.

“This kind of cynical impunity has been increasing in Michoacan,” Hope added.

The state attorney general said the killings discovered Thursday appeared to be part of a turf war.

When homicides dropped for a few years between 2012 and 2015, many thought Mexico’s drug war was winding down.

But homicides surged again last year and Mexico now has more murders than it did during the peak year of killings in 2011.

In the first half of 2019, Mexico set a record for homicides, with 17,608, up 5.3 percent compared to the same period of 2018. The country of almost 125 million now sees as many as 100 killings a day nationwide.