VICTIMS PILE UP, BUT IDs DON'T

Mexico Grows Numb to Killings, Gang Butchery

GUADALUPE, Mexico -The brutality done amid the stacks of rusting cars
might unnerve even the meanest junkyard dog.

Mexican soldiers raided a salvage yard here - tucked down a rutted
dirt road flanked by scrap heaps and truck repair shops on the east
side of Monterrey - to discover the fragmented remains of as many 14
people in shallow graves and 55-gallon drums.

The bodies had been burned, perhaps dissolved in acid, beyond
recognition. More victims of Mexico's gangland wars, investigators
said.

Little wonder. Cartel clashes have killed scores across northern
Mexico over the last 10 days: a car bombing in Ciudad Juarez, across
from El Paso; gunfights with troops in Nuevo Laredo, across from
Laredo; an attack on a birthday party in Torreon, 300 miles south of
west Texas; gun battles in Sinaloa, the Pacific Coast state considered
the cradle of Mexico's mobsters.

But with the underworld violence killing 25,000 Mexicans in less than
four years, assassins have become nearly as inventive at disposing of
their victims as in dispatching them.

Bodies Minus Limbs

Bodies get dumped in empty lots and roadsides, heaped together in
cases of massacre, or laid out alone if that's how the victim died.
Police recover corpses stuffed in cars, tumbled into clandestine
tombs, laid out like scrabble pieces to form letters.

The detached head, legs and trunk of a man's body were found strewn
through Ciudad Juarez on Tuesday evening, the local newspaper El
Diario reported, one of seven people killed in the city Juarez that
day.

With decapitations becoming almost cliche, now arms and legs get
severed, too. One victim in Ciudad Juarez was found crucified on a
chain-link fence with a pig's head attached to his torso. Another
reportedly had his face stitched to a soccer ball.

Videos of torture interrogations and gruesome executions appear
online.

"This is narco-terrorism. The criminals are seeking a reaction in the
public," said Eduardo Gallo, president of Mexico United Against Crime,
a citizens' group. "They want the public to doubt that government is
doing well in the fight. "We aren't addressing the psychological
damage this is causing. We are becoming so accustomed to such violence
that we incorporate it into our daily lives."

The macabre itself usually serves as the killers' message. But, as
punctuation, often-misspelled notes left with bodies explain why the
people were killed and warn others that a similar fate awaits.

"They have their own special codes of communication," said David
Perales, a press liaison with the Nuevo Leon state detective agency in
Monterrey. "Sometimes they use the bodies to leave a message, and
other times they want to hide all evidence of their crime."

Not So Subtle Messages

Three men were found hanging from bridges on busy roads this month in
Cuernavaca, the oasis 50 miles south of Mexico City once known mostly
for its flowering gardens and spring-like weather.

"You'll have to find another lover, I've killed this one for you,"
sneered a placard addressed to Texas-born gangster Edgar Valdez, whose
nickname was La Barbie. "The authorities can't do it, but we can."

"Let it be clear: all the pushers, thieves, extortionists and
kidnappers are going to end up like this," the note warned.

Dying far from their homes, many of the fallen are neither claimed by
families nor fully identified by authorities, and so they are buried
nameless in common graves of municipal cemeteries. Other victims
simply vanish, swallowed by the earth or disintegrated in a chemical
stew.

Officials in early June pulled 56 bodies from an abandoned mine shaft
south of Cuernavaca. Clandestine plots, called narco graves, and
makeshift crematoriums turn up from Cancun to the Baja California coast.

The scrap yard holding some of the latest discoveries hunkers on the
frayed edge of Monterrey - the wealthy city 130 miles south of the
border that is Mexico's industrial motor. Many of the businesses along
the lane leading to the yard seem abandoned.

A river flanks the high-fenced yard, as do empty lots, shipping
containers and a garbage dump. Steam shovels and trucks were noisily
depositing the rubble wrought by last month's Hurricane Alex into the
dump.

"This is the perfect place to do this sort of thing," said Heriberto
Enriquez, who was directing the trucks bringing rip-rap to the dump,
of the narco graves. "We're no longer shocked by any of this; it's
happening all the time now."

Identification Tough

A day after soldiers and investigators uncovered the graves, the yard
stood abandoned. Only two visibly frightened black dogs prowled behind
the locked wire gate.

Local media forgot the mass graves almost as soon as they were
discovered. Attention turned to the bodies of four young men dumped
last week in a busy intersection in Monterrey and gunbattles Friday in
Nuevo Laredo.

With only some teeth and bone fragments to work with, investigators
say, it will take a while to identify how many people were found in
the junkyard. Putting names to the remains will take longer.

"We have to do it scientifically," Adrian de la Garza, head of the
Nuevo Leon state detective force, said. "We still have to figure out
if they were human."