Cartel Violence Threatens to Destroy the Relative Peace of Mexico City Ioan Grillo - Time
go to original November 9, 2015

A unidentified man hangs from his waist under an overpass in Mexico City, early Monday, Oct. 19, 2015. (AP/Jair Cabrera)

The early morning rush hour often slows traffic to a snail pace in this sprawling megacity, but on Oct. 19, drivers on one road found themselves at a complete standstill. The holdup was caused by a grizzly discovery: a corpse hanging from a bridge. While such public displays of terror have become frighteningly common in parts of Mexico, the capital has long been considered an oasis from the narco violence. It is home to much of the nation’s political and business elite, a third of all foreigners in Mexico, including many Americans, and offices of major corporations. Photos of the dangling corpse on front pages raised alarm bells that the bubble of relative safety could have burst.

Fears were compounded in the following days when more corpses appeared alongside threatening messages, which are another terror tactic of Mexico’s mafias. Under public pressure, thousands of police hit the streets, arresting a 600 suspects. Among the suspects, prosecutors announced, was an alleged assassin involved in hanging the body. “We won’t tolerate impunity or any intimidation against the residents of Mexico City,” the city’s top prosecutor Rodolfo Rios told a news conference. Evidence gathered, he said, indicated that the murders are linked to gangs inside Mexico City’s crowded jails.

Mexico City has long been saved from cartel violence as it is not a turf that drug traffickers want to fight over. Most narco bloodshed is in the mountainous states where cartels grow opium and marijuana, such as Sinaloa, Michoacan and Guerrero, or along the 2,000-mile border with the United States, where traffickers smuggle their products to American users. When drug traffickers have surfaced here, it is often hiding out in exclusive apartments or luxury mansions, such as one that police raided to find a private zoo of lions, tigers and panthers. If cartel bosses run into each other in these exclusive neighborhoods, they often hold back from fighting, in what appears to be a kind of “pax mafiosa.”

However, the prison system has opened up a new front of violence here. During a decade of intense cartel fighting in Mexico, the security forces have arrested tens of thousands of their alleged operatives, including many sicario hit men. With prisons crowded across the county, many have ended up in jails in the capital.

Read the rest at Time

Related: After Spate of Killings, Mexico City Is Criticized for Failing to Admit Extent of Crime Problem (The Guardian)

Related: Mexico City Violence: Three Human Rights Activists Shot, Murder Rate at Highest Since 1998 (Inquisitr)

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