Mexico City – Mexico’s gangland-style murder wave continued with the discovery Thursday of two bodies, one of them in the north of a U.S. citizen, who may be a police officer, and the other in the south of a dismembered individual.
In the first of the two cases, the victim was identified as 37-year-old Omar Basaldua, a resident of McAllen, Texas, whose body was found in the municipality of Guadalupe, near the city of Monterrey.
The body had four bullet wounds, one of them in the head, and it seems that the murder was committed by presumed hitmen who fled.
The state Public Security Secretariat is investigating the case and gathering details about the victim, who may have been a U.S. policeman, according to preliminary information turned up by Mexican authorities.
The other killing was discovered late Wednesday night near Zihuatanejo, in the southern state of Guerrero, when the chopped-up body of a man was found in five plastic bags.
State attorney general’s office officials said that in the spot where the bags were found, authorities also discovered a message directed at drug traffickers Edgar Valdez Villarreal, alias “La Barbie,” and Arturo Beltran Leyva, both of the Sinaloa cartel.
The note had a letter “Z” written on the back of it, a mark of “Los Zetas,” a group of former soldiers and deserters working as gunmen for Gulf drug cartel kingpin Osiel Cardenas Guillen.
The new bodies were found hours after armed men presumably linked to organized crime abducted a former national legislator on one of the main streets of Acapulco and shortly afterward shot him to death and dumped his body on the roadside.
The victim was Juan Jose Nogueda, a former member of Congress for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
He was kidnapped Wednesday while accompanied by his secretary on the seaside Miguel Aleman Avenue, officials said. They said the woman, whose identity was not immediately provided, was not harmed.
A half hour after the abduction, Nogueda’s body, with three gunshot wounds, was found in the Acapulco neighborhood of Caleta.
Police said the modus operandi of the killers indicated a possible link to narcotics traffickers who have been blamed for a series of grisly torture-murders in the Pacific coast city in recent weeks, including the beheading of police officers.
