Simple things miguel ring tone12/13/2022 La Familia’s corpse messaging often mentions divine justice. Everyone should know: this is divine justice.” The sign left at that scene: “La Familia doesn’t kill for money, it doesn’t kill women, it doesn’t kill innocent people-only those who deserve to die. It first gained national attention in September, 2006, when five severed heads were rolled onto a dance floor at a night club called Sol y Sombra, in Uruapan, Michoacán. We will be waiting for you here.”Īmong Mexico’s drug-trafficking organizations, La Familia is the big new kid on the block. Two days later, it emerged that they had also kidnapped, tortured, and murdered twelve federal agents, leaving the bodies in a pile beside a highway with a handwritten sign: “Come for another. They had attacked federal police stations in eight Michoacán cities. La Familia had been incensed, it was reported, by the arrest of one of its leaders, and then by a bloody, failed attempt to spring him from jail in Morelia, the state capital. I had seen a video of the attack on YouTube: armored S.U.V.s, commandos firing AK-47s, all in broad daylight. He eventually mumbled, “ Los otros.” The others. He added that two federal officers had been killed. My driver agreed that there had been an attack. I passed that building, which is still bullet-pocked, windowless, scorched, and abandoned, one morning in a taxi. In fact, the local headquarters of the federal police had been attacked in July by La Familia fighters using assault rifles and grenades. But none of these other forces appeared to be working directly for the bad guys. People were also afraid of the federal police, he said, and of the Army, and of the Navy. The schoolteacher, who asked me not to use his name, was talking about the local police. When they arrest people, they don’t take them to police headquarters but to La Familia.” ![]() They’ll charge you a fee, but you’ll get your money. If you need to collect a debt, you go to them. “They’re a second law,” a schoolteacher in Zitácuaro said of La Familia. That was my impression, certainly, in January and February in Michoacán. Analysts have begun describing Mexico as a “failed state,” which is premature at best, but “state capture” is not too strong a term for the realities of power in an increasing number of places. In Michoacán a recent estimate found eighty-five per cent of legitimate businesses involved in some way with La Familia. The big crime syndicates-known as cartels, although they don’t actually collude to set prices-still earn billions from the production, smuggling, and sale of drugs, but they have also diversified profitably. La Inseguridad, as Mexicans call it, has become engulfing, with drugs sliding far down the list of public concerns, below kidnapping, extortion, torture, murder, robbery, corruption, unemployment, and simple fear of leaving the house. More than twenty-three thousand people have died in Mexico’s drug war since Calderón’s declaration-more than three thousand so far this year. Fifty thousand soldiers and twenty thousand federal police are now in the streets and countryside, but the bloodshed and disorder have grown worse. Large deployments to other hot spots, including Acapulco and the border cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, followed. Calderón’s first act was to send sixty-five hundred soldiers and federal police into Michoacán. Although large-scale trafficking had been around for decades, the violence associated with the drug trade had begun to spiral out of control. Mexico’s President, Felipe Calderón, declared war-his metaphor-on the country’s drug traffickers when he took office, in December, 2006. They might call los malosos-the bad guys-to tell them I was there asking questions. I wanted to ask the police some questions, but I was advised not to let the police know I was in town. I didn’t see a sign, but the message-terror-was clear enough, and everybody knew who left it: La Familia Michoacana, a crime syndicate whose depredations pervade the life of the region. “Talked too much.” “So that they learn to respect.” “You get what you deserve.” In the photograph in the Zitácuaro paper, the victim’s arms and legs and torso all lay separately, impossibly, in the street. Usually it involves a mutilated body-or a pile of bodies, or just a head-and a handwritten sign. It was what people call corpse messaging. ![]() ![]() ![]() On the morning before I arrived in Zitácuaro, a beautiful hill town in the western Mexican state of Michoacán, the dismembered body of a young man was left in the middle of the main intersection.
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