Mexico Under Siege

CLUES IGNORED IN MASS KILLINGS

Calls for the Dismissal of Tamaulipas Officials Grow As the Body
Count Reaches 177.

Suitcases started piling up, unclaimed, at the depot where buses
crossing northern Tamaulipas state ended their route. That should
have been an early clue.

Then the bodies started piling up, pulled by forensic workers from
two dozen hidden graves in the scruffy brush-covered ravines around
the town of San Fernando, 80 miles south of this city that borders
Brownsville, Texas.

At least 177 corpses have been recovered in the last few weeks, most
of them, officials now say, passengers snatched from interstate
buses, tortured and slaughtered. Women were raped before being
killed, and some victims were burned alive, according to accounts
from survivors who eventually overcame their fears and came forward.

The slayings have horrified a Mexican public already awash in
violence and led commentators to call them "our Auschwitz" and a
"Mexican genocide."

Worse yet is the realization that the killing in Tamaulipas state has
been going on for months -- including the brutal slayings of bus
passengers -- and no one, not the bus companies, nor the police, nor
the officials in charge, acted to stop it.

Elida Martinez, a gray-haired woman in her 60s, was one of dozens of
mothers, fathers and siblings of the missing who were waiting in the
morgue here the other day to offer blood samples for DNA testing.

Two of her daughters disappeared in February, one kidnapped from the
hotel in San Fernando where she worked and the other seized from her
home in the middle of the night a short time later. Between them they
left behind four children.

"You pray to God you won't find them here," she said. Yet the
gut-wrenching uncertainty tears her apart. "You don't sleep. You
can't work. You live in anguish."

After the massacre last year of 72 mostly Central American immigrants
near San Fernando, the government of President Felipe Calderon
promised the world, including angry Central American authorities,
that justice would be done and the popular routes through northern
Mexico toward the United States would be guarded.

It now appears, however, that the killings continued, and not just of
immigrants but Mexican citizens and, perhaps, a handful of Americans.
On Wednesday, authorities said they had rescued a group of 68
Mexicans and Central Americans who had been seized by gangsters from
buses or from bus stations in the same area.

The motives behind the bus kidnappings remain unclear. Gangs may
seize the passengers hoping to extort money from them, to forcibly
recruit them or because they are searching for rivals.

The killings have galvanized an unusual if belated consensus, even
among conservative commentators and politicians, that parts of Mexico
have indeed been lost to criminal gangs such as the Zetas and the
Gulf cartel that control (and are battling each other to dominate)
the northeast. What does it mean, they ask, when the federal
government cannot keep the nation's highways safe from brazen predators?

Even worse is the near-certainty that the police who are meant to be
protectors have been involved. Among the more than 50 people arrested
in connection with the latest killings are 17 local police officers
accused of providing protection to the cartel gunmen believed responsible.

There is growing demand for a new government strategy and that the
national Senate take the highly unusual step of dismissing the
state's elected but apparently ineffective officials, a move that
would also involve Calderon suspending civil rights in the region.

"If Tamaulipas is not a failed state, or a narco-state, it sure looks
like one," political analyst Alfonso Zarate said. "The institutional
powers are incapable of upholding the law."

Calderon has steadfastly resisted that characterization.

The top official in Tamaulipas is something of an accidental
governor. Egidio Torre Cantu was elected last year, standing in at
the last minute after his brother, a shoo-in for the job, was
assassinated by a drug gang.

"We are prisoners in towns that we cannot leave," said Mario Alberto
Alejandro, 43, who came to the morgue looking for his brother,
Rigoberto, a U.S. citizen who vanished Feb. 23 on the road to
Matamoros. "In whose hands are we?"

Alejandro echoed other families in saying authorities were giving
them the runaround, sending relatives from the morgue to one
government office after another and even in some cases to Mexico
City, where most of the bodies have been taken, in part because the
Matamoros morgue was full.

Alejandro said his brother Rigoberto has lived for 13 years in Texas,
where he works as a forklift operator. He was in Tamaulipas to visit
family, a trip he makes often.

"He never thought it would be this dangerous," Alejandro said. "There
is no security."

So many families have shown up at the Matamoros morgue that locals
set up a tent with chairs and a table offering coffee and water.
Doors have been plastered with dozens of pictures of missing people.

Francisco Garcia's nephew Jose was on his way to Chicago from central
Mexico when last heard from in early March. He was traveling with two
friends, who are also missing, and all were going to join family in the U.S.

"We have not received any information, no phone call asking for
ransom, nothing," said Garcia, a farmer. Too terrified to travel to
Matamoros, Garcia was among scores of people who instead went to the
morgue in Mexico City.

"Jose is just gone."

The Times reported in early March that several thousand people have
disappeared since Calderon launched the crackdown on drug gangs in
December 2006. Most vanished without a trace. Families nurse the hope
that their loved ones were taken as forced laborers on marijuana
farms or in meth labs. But the mass graves, here in Tamaulipas and in
other parts of the country, are slowly destroying those hopes. At
least 58 bodies were recovered last week from clandestine graves in
Durango state.

The main bus companies that run through Tamaulipas have altered their
schedules and eliminated nighttime trips through San Fernando. But
they have not spoken publicly about the killings. One manager,
speaking through a representative but insisting on anonymity,
confirmed the existence of unclaimed suitcases but would not discuss
why authorities were not informed about them.

"Maybe it's fear, or they didn't want to lose the business," said
Jose Javier Saldana, a regional human rights official. "Maybe the
drivers didn't report it up the chain [of management], either."

Although some of the families said the bus companies' failure to
sound the alarm was unconscionable, most put the blame on
authorities. Several families said authorities tried to pressure them
not to speak to reporters. Furthermore, officials in three central
states, Guanajuato, Queretaro and San Luis Potosi, say they have been
asking the Tamaulipas government about numerous missing citizens as
far back as 2009.

In the San Fernando case, in addition to the police officers, the
arrested include Martin Omar Estrada, a.k.a. "El Kilo," whom
authorities describe as a ringleader responsible for the latest dead
as well as last summer's migrant massacre. If true, that means
Estrada, who was arrested this month, and his gang continued to
operate with impunity for months.

Calderon recently promised to take back Tamaulipas and flood the zone
with troops. It was virtually the same promise he made five months ago.