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Corpses under the dance floor: the hall of horrors of the State of Mexico

2023-01-17T11:16:11.043Z


The arrest of a gang of criminals leads the authorities to a nightclub, an hour and a half from the capital, whose basement hid dozens of sacks with presumed human remains.


A huge bulldozer in an industrial warehouse, a bunch of police officers and experts, a hole in the ground and sacks, dozens of sacks, shapeless packages, plasticized, full of meat, illustrating a new horror in Mexico.

Authorities do not yet know how many bodies there are in total.

They don't even know if they are human remains, but the experience of a country that counts thousands of murdered and disappeared each year, with clandestine cemeteries at each cardinal point, points to the worst of possibilities.

The discovery of this new grave, located in the basement of a party hall in Tenango del Valle, an hour and a half from the capital of the State of Mexico, opens up a number of questions, some borrowed from past horrors: since when did they use this place? to bury bodies

Who did it?

How is it possible that nobody knew, that nobody said anything?

As usual, few of these questions have a clear answer.

At the end of last week, federal authorities and the State of Mexico arrested nine people, alleged members of "a criminal organization with origins in the State of Jalisco," according to a statement from the local Prosecutor's Office.

The agency has not reported where the arrests occurred, if they were all at once or how they got to the detainees.

The captures led the agents, in any case, to several properties of the criminal group in the area, one of them the Tenango party hall.

A soldier of the Mexican Army, outside the party room, while the State of Mexico Prosecutor's Office worked on the site. Crisanta Espinosa Aguilar (Cuartoscuro)

Based on information supposedly obtained from the detainees, mainly from what the Prosecutor's Office points out as their leader, Jaime Luis N, alias El Pozolero or El 666, the agents asked for an excavator to break the concrete on the floor of the room and start digging.

That same Friday the first sacks appeared.

This Sunday, the authorities already counted 46, according to local media reports.

In a video released by the unit, some of the detainees are seen next to a table, in the Prosecutor's Office, with dozens of bags of green grass.

Next to the bags there are also some patches with the initials of the criminal group to which the arrested criminals supposedly belong, CJNG, or Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación.

The use of emblems of this criminal group does not necessarily imply that users are part of their network.

The very structure of the CJNG and the level of dependency between its cells is often difficult to determine.

The Prosecutor's Office explains that El Pozolero participated last year in the kidnapping of a woman in Tenancingo, a few kilometers south of Tenango.

Released in August, El Pozolero and his henchmen had ripped off pieces of her fingers.

The authorities then arrested six people, presumed members of the same criminal cell.

So, El Pozolero escaped.

The local Prosecutor's Office, which in recent years has been in a battle with another group of criminals in the same area of ​​the State of Mexico, La Familia Michoacana, then seized half a dozen firearms and a number of chargers and cartridges.

Elements of the State of Mexico Prosecutor's Office outside the property where the bags with human remains have been located, in Tenango. Courtesy (FGJEM)

The agents also seized several bulletproof vests with the initials CJNG.

On one of the vests, instead of CJNG, the legend DELTA appeared, the name of one of the cells supposedly closest to its leader, Nemesio Oseguera, alias El Mencho.

Again, the appearance of names or initials linked to the criminal group on clothing seized from alleged criminals does not imply their belonging.

But the accumulation of data can tip the balance.

The presence of a CJNG cell apparently so active in the south of the State of Mexico, capable of murdering, as the Prosecutor's Office has explained, carrying out kidnappings and managing a clandestine grave in the basement of a party room, is strange.

First, because it does not seem to be part of its action map, whose nucleus is made up of the states of Jalisco, Michoacán, Guanajuato or Zacatecas.

And then due to the presence in very close areas in recent years of very violent cells of La Familia.

Between 2020 and last year, alleged members of La Familia clashed on numerous occasions with authorities from the State of Mexico in towns such as Texcaltitlán or Coatepec Harinas, the latter about 35 kilometers from Tenango del Valle.

In March 2021, hitmen from the group murdered 13 state police officers and the Prosecutor's Office in Coatepec.

In June, police officers killed 11 suspected criminal group hitmen in Texcaltitlán.

These confrontations undermined the capacity of this La Familia cell, which could explain the expansion of other groups, such as El Pozolero.

The coexistence of different cells in neighboring regions can also mean the existence of agreements or non-aggression pacts.

And that these pacts explain in some way the type of relationship that exists between the cells and the cartels on which they supposedly depend.

It is also possible that acronyms and names do not have much importance and are just part of the media apparatus of criminals.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-01-17

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