Click the Disaster
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Posted on 07/17/2011 9:26:43 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following story contains graphic, disturbing content and language that may not be suitable for some readers.
For some victims of the drug war in Mexico, the road to hell starts with a train ride.
First, coyotes approach, offering transportation to the border.
No money changes hands – yet.
The travelers are herded like cattle into boxcars.
There is little or no food; the heat is excruciating.
The monotonous thunder of the train on the rails lulls them.
Then, the train rolls to a stop.
The horror is about to begin.
THE REPORT
The Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, or Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, has issued a report documenting the “extreme” vulnerability of those who travel by rail in that country, especially for those kidnapped by drug organizations for theft, or for ransom and extortion pur-poses.
During the six-month period of April 2010 through September 2010, the commission documented 214 kidnappings, and an astounding 11,333 victims.
The pattern is evident, and long-established. From September 2008 through February 2009, the commission has documented 198 kidnappings involving 9,758 migrants.
How is such unfettered violence possible?
“That is the same question that we ask ourselves,” said Fernando Batista Jimenez, of the Human Rights Commission, adding that it is a complex issue that demands coordination among the nation, the states and municipalities, to address such crime.
TRANSIT ROUTES
The highest-risk zones for kidnapping include the states of Baja California, Chiapas, Coahuila, Mexico, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Michoacán, Nuevo León, Oaxaca, Querétaro, Quintana Roo, San Luis Potosí, Sonora, Tabasco, Veracruz — and Tamaulipas, the Mexican state that borders the Rio Grande Valley.
“The majority of these zones are directly related to the train routes the mi-grants use to travel through Mexico,” according to the report, dated Feb. 22, 2011.
The train routes that start in Tabasco and meander along the Gulf Coast states of Veracruz and Tamaulipas are among the most dangerous, the report indicates.
THE ROLE OF THE RAIL
The report begs the question: Knowing the danger of train travel in Mexico, who would take such a risk?
In short, the report finds, the victims are undocumented immigrants. Most are from Central America, passing through Mexico on their way north to the United States and the hope of providing for their families.
Knowingly or not, these migrants stumble from their quest for the Ameri-can Dream into a vicious and violent battle for dominance between drug cartels warring for territory and a federal government warring for control of the powder keg. The established, Tamaulipas-based Gulf Cartel is being chal-lenged by the renegade Zetas, an offshoot of the Gulf. Other cartels, like La Familia Michoacana and the Sinaloa Federation, make sporadic forays into the fray.
And at the heart of the drug war is the issue of which group controls the drug-trafficking routes that run from the interior of Mexico to the northern border — and thus controls the payoff.
It is no coincidence that these trafficking routes echo the rail lines, a consis-tent and generally unmonitored means of transportation for the poor and the illicit.
To control the rail, the illicit prey on the poor, whom they kidnap at train stations and at selected, often pre-selected stops.
Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla, 18, of Ecuador, is one of only two known survi-vors of what has come to be known as the first San Fernando Massacre. Sev-enty-two bodies, mostly migrants from Central America kidnapped from trains, were discovered in August 2010 in a warehouse near the city of San Fernando, Tamaulipas, about 100 miles south of Brownsville.
He has provided a detailed account of what transpired at the hands of the Zetas.
“We entered the house in a row. Once inside, they bandaged our eyes … we stood for about 20 minutes. I think they were waiting for nightfall. And then they placed us with our backs to the walls of the house. … They told us to lie face down, to be quiet, not to scream, because they were going to kill us.
“Then they started shooting. Someone shouted that he wasn’t afraid of them, and then you could hear that he was being struck against the wall. They shot him.
“One and another, shot. Until it was my turn. I pretended to be dead.”
Another survivor from an unrelated kidnapping from yet another train re-counts a similar horror.“They took more than 70 people from the train,” he said. “I was in the boxcar that was just behind the engine. I was able to see everything. I already knew they were Zetas. They tell us and tell us, but, what can we do, if we are poorer than anything over there (in Central America)?”
He believes that the trains are deathtraps because the Zetas control the train operators.
“What a coincidence, he brakes to stop just where we are going to be kid-napped,” the survivor said.
Women at a restaurant near the railway in Tierra Blanca, Veracruz, offer rest, food and water to victims. They, too, work for the Zetas, along with the coyotes and train operators, victims say.
“They know we are hungry, but food is only a trap to kidnap us.”
Those who are kidnapped are held for ransom for days, sometimes for months, according to victims’ testimonials. They are beaten, tortured and mutilated until they provide the telephone numbers of their families, who must pay dearly for their release.
The Mexican Attorney General’s Office says kidnapping victims generally have two choices: Join the Zetas criminal organization, which needs man-power for its protracted battle with Gulf Cartel and government forces, or pay ransom to help finance the fight.
Family members have paid from several hundred dollars up to $10,000, ac-cording to victims’ accounts. For those who do not – or cannot — pay the ransom, kidnappers prey on victims’ fears, telling them they will be sent to “zona zero.”
Zone zero.
Death.
KIDNAPPED: HELL ON EARTH
Fear and torture play a central role in the Zetas’ extortion repertoire, the report shows.
Victims’ hands and legs are bound. Their eyes are bandaged.
Some are told to stand. Others are thrown to the ground and ordered not to move.
They are fed little or no food.
They must kneel to get permission to go to the bathroom.
Inside the stash houses, where kidnapped travelers are held, the smell of death permeates the air.
Women and teen-age girls are raped, some repeatedly.
They are beaten. Some are killed.
One survivor told the Human Rights Commission, “What they did to me doesn’t matter. But what they did to the women hurts the most.
“There were 17 — 17 women that returned each night sadder, more injured, beaten. I will never forget what I saw.”
The women are separated from their children.
Many are mutilated, their fingers, even limbs, lopped off at times.
One victim recounts how they were threatened during crude, violent dia-tribes.
“Si se mueven, los vamos a matar, putos, hijos de su chingada madre (If you move, we’ll kill you, bitches, sons of bitches).”
For many, zona zero becomes a reality, as one survivor told the commis-sion.
“The victims for whom ransom was not paid would be taken outside, so that they ‘could see the stars up close,’ the miserable kidnappers said.”
“Ya te moriste, puto (You’re dead, bitch),” one victim was told shortly be-fore he was killed.
Others survive.
“I dream every day now that they’ve killed me,” one victim told the com-mission. “Their boards (used for beating victims) break my heart.”
Sounds like a train in need of a Willie Green gubmint cash infusion.
Well, that’s what you get when you have a disarmed populace and let the thugs have all the guns and 98% of the Law Enforcement on their side.
And if the gun grabbers get their way here, it will soon be much the same in ‘el norte’.
Who benefits from these murders?
Response: Then they are used to it and we need have no regrets in sending them back the same way! Load up trains, buses and semitrucks and in a few months the money saved by the reduction in governmental programs would pay off the debt and lower taxes.
Our challenge is to get Eric Holder's people to do the work now done by the illegals! Fat chance of that with them being supported by the Government.
The cartels.
Pre-Los Angeles... i.e. San Diego..
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