Why do cartels kill

The men who killed Cristina's husband were never brought to justice. There is no way to know whether they worked for the Zetas or Sinoloa cartels, which are active in Juarez Valley. That is a strong possibility, however. According to Ben West, an analyst for geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor, the cartels have increasingly diversified their criminal activity to include extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking, in response to losses incurred in the drug trade.

Ironically, this means that Mexican civilians are becoming victims of their government's success. West added: "You have criminal groups taking advantage of the overall security situation and basically pulling people at gunpoint and saying give me your money.

With the police all caught up in this, there is no rule of law. Cristina took a job at a Juarez nightclub after her husband's murder. She went from stay-at-home mother to single breadwinner for three overnight, and moved in with her parents so they could help. And for almost a year, they managed. Then the cartel violence found her again. On 31 March, , at about 8. Searching for weapons, they padded men between the legs, looked up women's skirts, emptied handbags and checked bathroom stalls.

That level of scrutiny was unprecedented, Cristina said. At one point an officer even began groping a colleague of hers. She intervened, saying: "Hey — we respect you and your work, you should respect us.

You can't treat us like that. A few minutes after the police left, two men entered the bar carrying automatic weapons. A man near entrance lunged for the doorway and they shot him. Everyone was screaming with fear. With ruthless abandon, the assassins opened fire in every direction, killing all they could, shooting everyone in sight. At some point the men lit the bar on fire. A waitress next to Cristina ran as soon as they left, saying: "I'd rather be shot to death than burn.

She ran outside, where several cars were on fire. She ran to the parking lot and suddenly froze when four pairs of headlights turned on. They were four federal police trucks. They had never left. Incredibly, municipal police pulled up just then. They jumped from their cars, hurling curses at their rivals. Despite serious efforts to purge corruption from their ranks, reports of Mexican law enforcement engaged in criminal activity are rampant. The government is running out of tools to fight this problem.

Cristina showed great poise escaping the El Castillo bar massacre; she fell into a daze, however, immediately afterward. Some hours earlier, the La Linea arm of the Chihuahua-based Juarez Cartel sent gunmen to defend the state border area, after attacks in a nearby town by the Los Salazar faction of the rival Sinaloa Cartel, a top Mexican general told reporters.

The Sinaloa and Juarez Cartels have for years been at odds over lucrative routes in the border region used to move cocaine, heroin and other narcotics into the United States. Mexico has long requested that Washington do more to control demand for drugs.

Mexico has unleashed its military against cartels since but despite the arrests or killings of leading traffickers, the campaign has failed to reduce violence. In fact, it has led to more killings as criminal groups fight among themselves. Mendoza said the Miller car appeared to have exploded because of the gunfire.

More than spent shell casings were left behind. Relatives of the victims rejected the mistaken identity theory, arguing that shell casings and personal belongings found near the torched car suggest the attackers came close and made sure everybody was dead before igniting the vehicle.

A man was arrested in a nearby town in a truck carrying a. When the gunmen shot dead his mother and two brothers, the uninjured year-old Devin Langford hid six surviving siblings nearby and walked for 14 miles 23 km to find a rescue party. The five dead men had all been systematically tortured before they were killed. Jumper cables, modified to fit a household outlet, had been attached to their ears to administer electric shocks.

There were traces of duct tape on their mouths and noses, bruises on their arms and wrists, and burn marks on their ears and necks. But the official line was dead wrong. Castaneda had to get the money back before it was spent, or he would become the equivalent of a narco sharecropper, forced to work off the debt by selling drugs for free until the half million was repaid.

The cartels rarely kill members of their sales force, preferring to keep them working. So Castaneda had hired a local hoodlum known as CJ to find the stickup crew responsible for the carjacking. Police say CJ and another thug named Train lured four of the victims to a meeting; the other dead man just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The jumper cables were the ones CJ used to kill his pit bulls when they became too old to fight.

What made national news as evidence of the reach of the Mexican drug cartels was, it appears, a dope-dealer rip-off gone haywire. To anyone who knows how the narcos operate, the murders looked pretty half-assed by Mexican standards. If old CJ wanted to convince us that it was the Mexicans, he would have to bear down a lot harder. But the lack of any evidence linking Mexican drug lords to the homicides did nothing to dissuade Robert Owens, the district attorney in Shelby County, from treating the murders as part of a broader conflict between rival cartels.

Owens freely admits that his office is unprepared to make sense of such killings. Chris Curry, the sheriff for Shelby County, is equally blunt. F or now, violence stemming directly from the cartels has been largely confined to U. In Phoenix, where the number of kidnappings has tripled since , police have created a special unit to deal with the wave of abductions.

Federal officials, however, continue to insist that the drug lords are personally ordering assaults within the United States. According to the National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican cartels now operate in cities across the country. On August 20th, the Justice Department indicted El Chapo and nine other top drug lords on charges of criminal conspiracy. To do so would endanger their business — and business is good. We never got a wire on him. Once the load got taken, he disappeared.

The last we heard, an informant saw him back in Mexico working out at a gym with two security guys guarding him. All we got was the local guys doing the monkey work. The bust began with an informant in federal prison, who told the DEA that El Chapo was importing 1, kilos of coke a year into New York through a trucking company in California. But the entire investigation was based on a ruse. He actually fooled the Mexicans. How America Lost the War on Drugs Torturing rivals and beheading victims serves a purpose in Mexico, where drug-related violence has killed 12, people in the past three years; narcotraficantes routinely use brutality to subdue competitors, eliminate witnesses and frighten off police recruits.

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