Posted on 06/14/2009 9:49:19 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
La Familia quickly set itself apart as a kind of criminal organization not seen before in Mexico. The cartel employed a public relations specialist known as El Tio, or the Uncle, and presented itself as a semi-legitimate company that hired only Michoacan residents and worked for the benefit of the mostly impoverished state. ....
Rafael Pequeño García, chief of anti-drug operations at Mexico's Public Security Ministry, said La Familia filled a vacuum in social services and community development.
"When you needed help, you didn't go to the government. You went to the narcos," he said. "They are a parallel structure, and they have a way of satisfying the needs of the people. In this way, they maintain social control." ....
La Familia published a manifesto in Michoacan newspapers, promising to deliver books and build schools "to improve the education of society." Members are forced to carry a self-published "spiritual manual" of New Age aphorisms by leader Nazario Moreno González, who is known as El Mas Loco, or the Craziest One. ....
But La Familia is better known for its wanton violence. In September 2006, in its most infamous act of savagery, two dozen hooded men burst into the Sun and Shade disco in the Michoacan city of Uruapan and tossed five heads onto the dance floor. They left a message that read: "La Familia doesn't kill for money. It kills only those who deserve to die."
La Familia members have killed their rivals by driving ice picks through their skulls and boiling them to death. In an escalating competition of slaughter, the cartel has strewn the region with headless corpses wrapped in plastic and others with hacked-off limbs, graphic images that often appear in Michoacan's lurid crime tabloids.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
/johnny
That’s what it took in Chile and Peru...among others.
Ed
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