MEXICO CITY — Masked gunmen dump the bodies of 35 slaying victims during rush hour as terrified motorists watch and tweet friends to avoid the highway.
A woman’s decapitated body is left at a city’s monument to Columbus, the head atop a computer keyboard with a sign saying she was killed for blogging about drug traffickers.
The severed heads of five men are dumped outside an elementary school in Acapulco, and two more near a military base in Mexico City days later.
And that was just in the past three weeks.
The brutal public killings that began about five years ago have worsened as Mexican drug cartels try to one-up one another in their quest to scare off rivals, authorities and would-be informers — and still stun Mexicans increasingly numbed to the gory spectacles.
“These gangs have to keep escalating because they want the shock value, but the shock value wears off,” said Clark McCauley, a psychology professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and an expert on terrorism. “Now, to get a headline you have to get more heads, or more bodies or do something more horrific.”
Latin American drug lords have long turned to grisly killings and torture tactics. At the height of its powers in the 1990s, the Juarez cartel used to cut off the fingers of snitches and shove them down their throats, a practice that other cartels soon followed.
The current savagery began in April 2006 when two police officers were decapitated. Their heads were left in the resort city of Acapulco, where four alleged members of the Zetas drug cartel had been killed in a shootout with police.
Since then, drug traffickers have plunged into even more gruesome tactics. They have tied victims to overpasses and shot them to death during rush hour. Some have decapitated people alive and posted videos of it on the Internet.
Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna has said cartels are using al-Qaeda’s methods to pressure the government to halt its crackdown against drug traffickers, which has fractured many of the gangs.
Very few of the killings result in arrests or convictions, so the only deterrent is revenge by another cartel.
