Another story about northern Mexico's real-life Gothic argues that those horrors are getting even worse.
“The difference is this,” he says. “In what I would call normal times, I kill you and make you disappear. Now they are shouting it, turning it into a kind of grotesque carousel around their territory. In normal conditions, the torture and killing is private. Now it is a public execution using extreme violence, and this is significant, I think.”
The good doctor really goes out on a limb: "We need to say one thing first: these people are drama queens." Nice knowing you, friend.
So if this explanation is right, it describes how a Mexican riff on Grand Guignol leaps right off the stage:
“Bone tickling” involves scraping the bone with an ice pick sunk through the flesh. Doctors are employed to ensure that those questioned or tortured do not lose consciousness. Bodies turn up with the phone number for emergency services carved into their skin—in effect, “Call 911.” One cartel, La Familia, made its “coming out” known in a famous episode: bowling five severed heads across the floor of a discotheque. In Sonora in 2009, a white S.U.V. was found abandoned, and inside it a butcher’s display of mutilated bodies—hacked, chopped, castrated, decapitated. It was a carful of human cutlets, with no apparent relationship of one piece to another until they were matched by forensic authorities.
And more:
Earlier this year, 36-year-old Hugo Hernandez was abducted in Sonora; his body turned up a week later in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, but not in a single piece. His torso was in one location, his severed arms and legs (boxed) in another. The face had been cut off. It was found near city hall, sewn to a soccer ball. In Ciudad Juárez, in November 2008, as dawn broke over the desert, a body was found hanging from a highway overpass. It had been decapitated and was dangling by a rope tied around the armpits. It was still there an hour later, when I saw it—swaying in the wind, hands cuffed behind its back. Next to the victim the executioners had hung a sheet, on which they had painted a message: yo lazaro flores, apoyo a mi patron, el monte perros—“I, Lazaro Flores, served my boss, the dog fucker.”
Read this far? Go further: "There is a darkness in these acts that recalls the atrocities committed in Bosnia and Rwanda."
This post's title refer's to Bolaño's extraordinary novel.
(via Charles Cameron, I think)
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