Grotesque video circulating on social media recollects darkest days of Mexico’s drug cartel brutality

MEXICO CITY — A ugly video circulated Wednesday on social media could have recorded the final moments of 5 kidnapped younger males, and has transported Mexico again to the darkest days of drug cartel brutality within the 2000s.

Prosecutors within the western state of Jalisco say they’re investigating the video, and family members of the lacking group of younger pals instructed native media that their clothes resembled that worn by the lads within the video.

Essentially the most horrifying factor isn’t just the pair of sure, inert our bodies seen mendacity within the foreground. It’s the truth that the youth seen bludgeoning and apparently decapitating one other sufferer seems to be himself the fourth member of the kidnapped group of pals.

The fifth member of the kidnapped group — younger pals who had traveled to attend a competition within the metropolis of Lagos de Moreno in Jalisco state — often is the physique police discovered inside a burned-out automobile within the space. The younger males went lacking Friday in an space recognized for cartel violence, and authorities have mounted an enormous seek for them.

Luis Méndez Ruiz, the Jalisco state lawyer basic, stated Tuesday that the lads seen within the video “may very well be the 5 males who’re being looked for.”

“This video and the knowledge that was made public on a social media platform is now a part of the investigation,” Méndez stated. The clothes worn by the lads within the video additionally resembles a photograph of them alive, however sure, that was launched earlier.

The video incorporates a textual content written over the picture that claims “Puro MZ,” an obvious reference to El Mayo Zambada, the chief of a faction of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Nevertheless it was unclear who was accountable for the video.

If confirmed, the video — which reveals somebody off-screen tossing the youth a brick, so he can bludgeon the sufferer with it — would revive recollections of probably the most horrifying cases of drug cartel brutality, wherein kidnap victims had been pressured to kill one another.

In 2010, one Mexican cartel kidnapped males from passenger buses and compelled them to battle one another to loss of life with sledgehammers.

That tragedy got here to gentle in 2011, when authorities discovered 48 clandestine graves containing the our bodies of 193 folks within the northern border state of Tamaulipas. Most had their skulls crushed with sledgehammers, and plenty of had been Central American migrants.

It was later revealed the victims had been pulled off passing buses by the {old} Zetas drug cartel, and compelled to battle one another with hammers or be killed, in the event that they refused to work for the cartel.