Free Republic

The bodies of nine students who went missing on vacation in southern Mexico last month have been found dismembered by the side of a local highway — with a bag of hands nearby. The group’s gruesome remains were discovered in the trunk of an abandoned vehicle and underneath a blood-covered tarp in San Jose Miahuatlan on the border of the Mexican states of Puebla and Oaxaca. ... Four of the bodies were in the trunk, while the other five corpses were left under the tarp. A bag with eight pairs of hands was also found at the scene, with two...

On the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest, people from Mexico’s smallest state Tlaxcala say their ancestors were liberators When people from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala travel to other parts of the country, they are sometimes insulted as traitors by their compatriots. Tlaxcala is Mexico’s smallest state in size, but it played an outsized role in Mexico’s early history, not least when indigenous Tlaxcalans allied with Hernán Cortés’ tiny band of invaders to bring down the Aztec empire. Now, as Mexico marks the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán on Friday, the role of the...

Excavations at the Zultepec-Tecoaque archaeological site in Tlaxcala, Mexico, have revealed that indigenous Acolhuas peoples captured a caravan of 550 conquistadors and their allies in 1520, kept them in captivity, and ate them over a period of nine months. And new research suggests that these acts were not random; it seems the Acolhuas people were re-creating their creation myths. Who were the Acolhuas’ Sacrificial Victims? Hernán Cortés , the Spanish usurper of Mexico at the time, was in the caravan to Tenochtitlan but rode ahead to help put down a rebellion in Mexico City before the Acolhuas party struck. The...