Grisly Discovery in Tlaxcala
Officers made the discovery early Tuesday on a connection between the two states. The police have not publicly disclosed a motive for the killings or named which criminal organisation may have been behind the attack. Local news media reported that a blanket had been abandoned at the site with a warning to rival gangs and attributed it to a group that said it called itself "La Barredora," or "the sweeper." The state has a group with the same name, but it was not clear if the two were related.
The prosecutor's office in the state of Tlaxcala said that the heads belonged to men and that an investigation would be opened about the killings. Fuel smuggling, called "huachicolea" locally, is a major illegal business in the area, producing billions of dollars for criminal groups on top of drug sales.
Violence Amid National Crackdown
Federal officials have not formally announced the case. The killings take place amid a national crackdown on fentanyl trafficking by the administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum. Although Puebla and Tlaxcala are not usual hot spots of deadly cartel violence, the hearts are in line with the brutality elsewhere.
In June, 20 bodies, four of them decapitated, were found in Sinaloa, an area that has long been the site of gang wars. A month before that, seven young men were killed in a shooting at a Catholic Church celebration in Guanajuato. Crime has long been rampant in Mexico, but violence between criminal groups has spiralled in the past few years, with hundreds of thousands killed and tens of thousands more disappeared since the government first began deploying the military against cartels in 2006.
