•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   
•    EYEWITNESS   

Mexico City. The discovery of 72 slain Central and South American migrants on a ranch just south of the United States border provides a horrific reminder of the brutality of human trafficking in a country dominated by drug cartels.

A wounded Ecuadorean who escaped the killing in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state told authorities that the migrants’ abductors identified themselves as Zetas, a drug gang whose control of parts of the state is so brutal and complete that even many Mexicans avoid traveling its highways.

Migrants running the gauntlet up Mexico to reach the United States have long faced extortion, violence and theft.

But reports have grown of mass kidnappings of migrants, who are forced to give the telephone numbers of relatives in the United States or back home who are then required to transfer ransom payments to the abductors.

Teresa Delagadillo, who works at the Casa San Juan Diego shelter in Matamoros just across from Brownsville, Texas, said she often hears stories about criminal gangs kidnapping and beating migrants to demand money — but never a horror story on the scale of this week’s massacre.

“There hadn’t been reports that they had killed them,” she said.

In an April report, Amnesty International called the plight of tens of thousands of mainly Central American migrants crossing Mexico for the United States a major human rights crisis.

The report called their journey “one of the most dangerous in the world” and said every year an untold number of migrants disappear without a trace.

Mexico’s government has confirmed at least seven cases of cartels kidnapping groups of migrants so far this year, said Antonio Diaz, an official with the National Migration Institute.

But other groups say migrant kidnappings are much more rampant.

In its most recent study, the National Human Rights Commission said some 1,600 migrants are kidnapped in Mexico each month.

The commission based its figures on the number of reports it received between September 2008 and February 2009.

If confirmed as a cartel kidnapping, the Tamaulipas massacre would perhaps be the most extreme case seen so far and the bloodiest massacre of Mexico’s drug war.

On Tuesday, Ecuadorean migrant Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla staggered to the checkpoint with a bullet wound in his neck.

He told the Mexican marines he had just escaped from gunmen at a ranch in San Fernando, 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Brownsville, Texas.

He described a hellish scene of a room strewn with the bodies of 72 migrants, some piled on top of each other.

Violence along the northeastern border with the United States has soared this year since the Zetas broke with their former employer, the Gulf cartel.

Authorities say the Gulf cartel has joined forces with its once-bitter enemies, the Sinaloa and La Familia gangs, to destroy the Zetas.

It was the third time this year that Mexican authorities have discovered large masses of corpses. In the other two cases, investigators believe the bodies were dumped at the sites over a longer period of time.

In May, authorities discovered 55 bodies in an abandoned mine near Taxco, a colonial-era city south of Mexico City. In July, investigators found 51 corpses near a trash dump outside the northern metropolis of Monterrey.

 
Associated Press