MEXICO CITY – Masked gunmen dump the bodies of 35 slaying victims during rush hour as terrified motorists watch and tweet friends to avoid the highway.
A woman’s decapitated body is left at a city’s monument to Columbus, the head atop a computer keyboard with a sign saying she was killed for blogging about drug traffickers.
The severed heads of five men are dumped outside an elementary school in Acapulco, and two more near a military base in Mexico City days later.
And that was just in the last three weeks.
The brutal public killings that began about five years ago have worsened as Mexican drug cartels try to one-up each other in their quest to scare off rivals, authorities and would-be informers — and still stun Mexicans increasingly numbed to the gory spectacles.
“These gangs have to keep escalating because they want the shock value but the shock value wears off,” said Clark McCauley, a psychology professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and an expert on terrorism. “Now, to get a headline you have to get more heads, or more bodies or do something more horrific.”
Latin American drug lords have long turned to grisly killings and torture tactics. At the height of its
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