The bodies that turned up on a squalid back street in the border town of Reynosa in December were no longer human. The torsos showed deep lacerations and punctures; the severed heads were badly beaten and *********. Crudely butchered limbs lay scattered across the tarmac stained by *****.
"See. Hear. Shut up, if you want to stay alive," read a note written - like so many others - in block letters on a splattered poster board.
******** fueled by the ******* **** trade has long been a daily fact of life along the U.S.-Mexico border. But as the Mexican and U.S. governments have made significant inroads in dismantling an older order of **** cartels, their rivals and even newer ones have moved to fill the vacuum - and fill it in increasingly terrifying and barbarous ways.
The savagery began in earnest in 2006 in the city of Uruapan in the Mexican state of Michoacan, about 100 miles southeast of Guadalajara, when **** gang members stormed into the Sol y Sombra discotheque and dumped the *********** heads of five rival cartel members onto a white tile dance floor - shocking people throughout Mexico.
