MINE TURNED INTO BOTTOMLESS PIT OF DEATH

Mexican Drug-War Victims Thrown Into 600-Foot Shaft Alive, Police Say

TAXCO, Mexico - One of the nastier chapters of
Mexico's gangster wars now haunts this beguiling
colonial city long known for its silversmiths and tourist throngs.

Investigators have pulled 56 corpses and four
heads from the 600-foot-deep mine shaft on the
edge of this town, nestled in the verdant
mountains 110 miles south of Mexico City.

Many of the victims were dumped into the slanted
chute while still alive and aware.

"The rocks in the shaft are sharp-edged and tore
at the bodies," Luis Rivera, 23, Guerrero state's
senior criminologist in Taxco, said in explaining
the feet, hands and legs torn from some victims.
"There were some who arrived alive at the bottom."

Only eight of the badly decomposed bodies have
been identified so far, including that of a
prison warden kidnapped in late May. But police
say all the victims were killed by the henchmen
of a Texas-born gangster, Edgar Valdez, who is
warring for control of one of Mexico's largest drug-trafficking
organizations.

Not long ago, such a gruesome discovery would
have been headline news for weeks in Mexico. But
the atrocities linked to the country's gangland
wars come too fast these days for any to draw notice for long.

Shootouts no longer shock. Beheadings have become
boring and massacres mundane. Unearthed
narco-graves =AD the clandestine mass tombs where
many drug war victims lie - now serve merely as mileposts.

More than 400 people this year have been killed
gangland style in Guerrero state, which includes
Taxco, as Valdez's group fights with his rivals
for smuggling routes and local markets. Amid that
fighting, men have been disappearing by the
dozens in Taxco and surrounding towns. 'Count the heads'

There were rumors that some of those who vanished
had been dumped down the ventilation tunnel of
the mine, which like most others nearby has been
closed for three years by a labor strike.

The vent sits alongside a badly rutted road that
overlooks a valley of grazing livestock and farm
fields a few miles from town. A 465-year-old
hacienda, which was the first silver processing
plant in Mexico and now hosts a New Age wellness
retreat, sits half a mile away.

Precisely to keep people from falling into the
shaft, the mining company years ago had it
enclosed by tall cinder-block walls topped with
closely spaced iron beams. But someone had
removed some of the blocks, leaving a small breach in one wall.

People used to throw trash and sometimes dead
animals into the pit through that gap, one local
resident said. Gangsters dispatched their victims the same way.

Investigators had responded to past rumors by
searching the upper reaches of the vent, finding
nothing. They were sent in again on May 29 after
captured gangsters told army interrogators that
they recently had dumped three men into the hole.

Rivera, the state criminologist, got the call
before dawn that Saturday morning. He sent an
underling into the mine, who called by late
morning to report there were "many bodies" in a
large pit at the foot of the shaft.

The number of victims wasn't easy to calculate,
the man told Rivera, because there also were many unattached limbs.

"I told him to count the heads," Rivera said in a
hushed voice. "I knew I would have a lot of work."

Rivera informed his superiors of the discovery
and was told to retrieve the mangled remains by
any means necessary, despite a lack of proper
rescue equipment. Rounding up local firefighters
and police officers for the task, Rivera
reluctantly decided he had to go down into the mine himself.

Climbing into his office's single disposable
biohazard suit, Rivera descended on a rusted
ladder for the first 11 yards or so, then rappelled the rest of the way
down.

Once on the bottom, Rivera said, he stumbled over
something and stepped into a tangled heap of
decaying flesh. It felt like quicksand, he said,
the dead floating in a thickened broth of water
and the fluids from their decomposing remains. Bodies stacked deep

Rivera had assumed the pit was no more than a
foot or two deep. But when he tried to gauge it
with a 5-foot board, he couldn't touch bottom.
The team then realized that the floating bodies
were stacked several deep. As one was pulled out, another would surface.

Working in the dank, dark cavern, Rivera and the
other men began pulling bodies from the pit. They
lifted the victims in their arms, wrapped them in
burlap sacks and looped ropes around them. Others
at the surface pulled the bodies up by hand.

The crews managed to retrieve only four victims
in the first 24 hours. It took six days to remove them all.

Rivera said that scabs on some of the bodies
suggested their hearts were still beating when
they were plunged into the mine's maw, the rocks
and jutting metal bars biting into them like fangs.

"Many were thrown in alive," the criminologist said.

People have been coming to Rivera's office and to
morgues all month, searching for family members
who have gone missing. They bring face shots,
descriptions of tattoos and birthmarks, lists of
clothes the missing were wearing when last seen. Many to remain nameless

Investigators positively identified one of the
men by a leg that bore a tattoo of the Virgin of
Guadalupe and another proclaiming "Made in
Mexico." Another reclaimed his name because "Rosa" was inked into his chest.

But most of the bodies are decayed almost beyond
recognition as human. A few had become mummified,
Rivera said. The cold and humid conditions of the
mine - and its lack of insects and foraging wild
animals - make establishing any time of death difficult, he said.

So Rivera can offer little hope to most of the
searching relatives. But he'll keep trying.

"These might have been bad people," Rivera said
of the victims. "But their families are not at fault. They need to know.