August 25, 2010|By Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Mexico City — Mexican marines searching a ranch in northern Mexico found the bodies of 72 people who may have been Central and South American migrants kidnapped by the Zetas drug gang, authorities said Wednesday.
Officials said the corpses of 58 men and 14 women were found Tuesday after a daylong search of a rural swath about 90 miles south of Texas in the violent border state of Tamaulipas, a key smuggling corridor where a bloody feud between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas has produced an air of lawlessness and widespread fear. Authorities did not specify a possible motive for the killings, though migrants have been targeted for extortion by criminal groups.
Information remained incomplete and was based largely on the testimony of a migrant from Ecuador who survived the slaughter and helped marines find the site. With a gunshot wound in his neck, the migrant made his way Monday to a highway checkpoint and summoned marines for help.
Navy spokesman Rear Adm. Jose Luis Vergara said the man told marines that 70 or so fellow migrants had been shot to death by members of the Zetas, a drug-trafficking gang notorious for its ruthless methods.
The gang, once the armed wing of the Gulf cartel, now acts on its own and has increasingly branched into migrant smuggling and other criminal enterprises.
Alejandro Poire, spokesman for the government's anti-crime strategy, said authorities had yet to confirm the nationalities of the victims, but that preliminary information indicated they were from El Salvador, Honduras, Brazil and Ecuador.
President Felipe Calderon, interviewed on radio Wednesday, said the slayings showed the "beastliness" of organized crime groups and the need to continue his government's nearly 4-year-old offensive against them.
The incident underscored the chaos along Mexico's northern border and the spreading involvement of drug gangs in an array of illegal activities, including kidnapping, extortion and selling pirated goods.
The deaths also highlight the risks faced by undocumented migrants crossing Mexico for the United States as ruthless drug-trafficking groups elbow further into the smuggling of people. The criminal bands clash with one another over control of smuggling routes and have kidnapped groups of undocumented migrants from competitors.
In July, 21 people died during a gunfight between rival drug and migrant traffickers in the northern state of Sonora, near the Arizona border.
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