© The Associated Press/Victor Fernandez
A soldier patrols as a vehicle that was discovered carrying bodies inside is taken away in Guadalajara, Mexico, Thursday, Nov. 24, 2011.
A soldier patrols as a vehicle that was discovered carrying bodies inside is taken away in Guadalajara, Mexico, Thursday, Nov. 24, 2011.
Law-enforcement officials said the men were found, shot execution-style, in two vans and a pickup truck abandoned near the Milennium Arches, one of the most recognizable landmarks in Mexico's second-largest city.
Best known as the home of mariachi music and tequila, Guadalajara also sits on the main highway running through western Mexico from the methamphetamine-producing state of Michoacan north toward the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa. In recent months, security officials and analysts have worried that the city could become a target for the Zetas drug cartel, which has been using paramilitary-style tactics and headline-grabbing atrocities in a national push to grab territory from older organized crime groups.
"These acts of barbarism show how the war between cartels, and crime, is getting more brutal," Guadalajara's mayor, Jorge Aristoteles Sandoval, told reporters.
A message was found with the bodies in one of the vehicles, said Luis Carlos Najera, public security secretary for the state of Jalisco. He provided no details, but Mexican cartels frequently leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims as a way of sowing fear and taking credit for their actions.
Comment: For a deeper understanding of what's really going on here, please see the following links:
Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Applied for Political Purposes
Ponerology: The Study of Evil - Interview with Marian Wasilewski