MEXICO CITY — In the latest grim twist to this nation’s drug wars, at least six bodies have been left this week on the streets of a major border city bearing signs warning people against participating in an army program for informing on traffickers.Many of the bodies found since Monday in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, Calif., bore signs of torture. Several of the men were strangled. One victim was a police officer.
Index fingers of at least four victims were mutilated — a traditional signal that the dead man was an informant. Placards attached to all the bodies carried variations of a warning: “Continue informing. Yes, we are following through.”
The warning referred to a Mexican army program launched last month urging citizens to use a telephone hot line and e-mail addresses to tip off authorities to the identities of traffickers.
The Spanish equivalent of “Yes, we are following through” is an e-mail address to send information to the local military command.
“It’s very dramatic,” said Victor Clark, a veteran human rights campaigner in Tijuana. “There is a constant search in the underworld to find a new way to intimidate, to control, to send a message to authorities.”
“Putting a warning sign on a body is not the same as putting it on a tree.”
Officials were quick to assure the public that the identities of the informers were kept secret.
Clark said it was uncertain if those killed had indeed participated in the army program.
Rather, he said, the drug gangsters could simply be using people killed for any reason as a means of terrorizing soldiers and citizens alike.
“I doubt it will have much impact because things have been so bad,” Clark said of the warnings. “It’s not that we have become accustomed (to such violence,) it’s just that it has become part of daily life.”
Violence has been escalating in Tijuana. Last month, six kidnapping victims were killed by their captors during a three-hour shootout with troops in a residential neighborhood.
Similar violence has racked Reynosa, Matamoros and other cities bordering the Lower Rio Grande Valley this year, despite the presence of thousands of federal police and soldiers. Troops have seized arsenals of weapons, including grenade launchers and automatic rifles.
Other weapons caches have been seized from suspected gangsters in Mexico City, as well, including one Wednesday that authorities are linking to the drug trafficking organization based in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa.
“We are in a new stage of criminality,” Clark said. “We are very close to narco-terrorism appearing.”
Journalism and Mexican politics 