* Police found a woman's decapitated body in a Mexican border city on Saturday, alongside a handwritten sign saying she was killed in retaliation for her postings on a social networking site. The gruesome killing may be the third so far this month in which people in Nuevo Laredo were killed by a drug cartel for what they said on the internet...
* The scene was shocking. Masked gunmen blocked a busy road in the once-quiet port city of Veracruz, abandoning two trucks with 35 bodies inside, near a big shopping center. It was Tuesday at 5 p.m., broad daylight. People on the streets watched the corpses being left at an underpass. Some of the victims had their hands tied and showed signs of having been tortured. The picture could have been extracted from a horror movie.
According to Veracruz state Attorney General, Reynaldo Escobar, 23 of the victims were men and 12 were women. “We have never seen a situation like this before,” said Escobar. His words resounded across the country: Mexico is becoming the country of “never befores.”
* Mexican authorities discovered 11 more bodies in the coastal state of Veracruz on Thursday, days after 35 bodies were found on a busy road in the same area, the state-run Notimex news agency reported...On Thursday, Mexico´s attorney general said the killing of the 35 people stemmed from a drug-dealing dispute...
* The message is delivered by a phone call to the office of one school, a sheaf of photocopied papers dropped off at another, a banner hung outside a third. The demand is the same: teachers have until Oct. 1 to start handing over half of their pay. If they do not, they risk their lives.
Extortion is a booming industry in Mexico, with reported cases having almost tripled since 2004. To some analysts, it is an unintended consequence of the government’s strategy in the drug war: as the large cartels splinter, armies of street-level thugs schooled in threats and violence have brought their skills to new enterprises...