Prosecutors in the state of San Luis Potosi said late Thursday that the bodies did not appear to be from the municipality of Aquismon, and that they may have been killed elsewhere and dumped in a rural area. Photographs of the bodies showed extensive bruises on the bodies, indicating that they had been beaten. Writing engraved on markers on corpses said “this happened to me because I was working with the Gulf”, an obvious reference to the Gulf Cartel, which operates mainly along the US border to the north. The messages bore the signature “Valles Operation OB”, apparently a reference to an opposing gang. The Huasteca region has long been popular with Mexican tourists for its waterfalls and crystal clear rivers. A 2016 archive photo of Micas Waterfall in the Huasteca area of ​​San Luis Potosi State, Mexico. Mahaux Charles / AGF / Universal via Getty Last month, the Justice Department said former Gulf Cartel leader Mario Cardenas-Guillen had been extradited to Texas on drug charges. The cartel is using “intimidation and extreme violence to maintain control of its territory in northeastern Mexico and to distribute deadly drugs to communities in the United States,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram. According to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, the Gulf Cartel was the main competitor to Sinaloa challenging traffic routes in the early 2000s, but is now battling its former enforcement wing, the Los Zetas and Zeta Cartel. in areas in northeastern Mexico. .
Mexico has seen a recent wave of deadly violence linked to cartels and gangs. On Tuesday, gunmen killed five high school students and a woman in a street shooting in the state of Guanajuato, an area where gangs are fighting to control drug and stolen fuel routes. Two weeks earlier, eight women and three men had been killed in an apparent revenge attack on two bars and a hotel in Celaya, another town in Guanajuato. Since December 2006, when the government launched a controversial military anti-drug operation, Mexico has recorded more than 340,000 homicides, according to official figures. Authorities have blamed organized crime for most of the killings. In April, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador confirmed that Mexico had disbanded a special unit trained by US authorities to fight drug cartels because it had been infiltrated by criminals.