 Police found 18 mutilated, headless bodies near a lake popular with tourists and American retirees just outside Guadalajara, Mexico, a massacre that authorities blamed on the Zetas drug cartel. He said authorities received a phone call alerting them to the presence of two minivans on a dirt access road near Lake Chapala, which is popular with tourists and American retirees. Los Zetas have been battling the Jalisco New Generation gang, a minor cartel allied with the Sinaloa cartel, which is the Zetas chief rival for dominance of the Mexican drug trade. Mexican drug cartels frequently dismember the bodies of their victims or leave them stuffed into vehicles. The gangs also frequently leave hand-written messages alongside their victims' bodies, and Coronado said that such messages were found in the vans. "They are clearly messages between rival groups that are in conflict," said Tomas Coronado, prosecutor for the state of Jalisco. A woman detained yesterday in connection with the separate kidnapping of 12 people in the same area told police that the abductions were connected to events in Tamaulipas state. Two dozen men and women were found decapitated or hanging from bridges in Nuevo Laredo, on the border with Texas, on Friday, where the Zetas are battling the Gulf cartel, another Sinaloa cartel ally.
– There's no end in sight to the horrific tit-for-tat Mexican drug cartel murders. In the latest atrocity, some 18 decapitated and dismembered corpses were found dumped in two cars near a lake in Guadalajara popular with tourists and retired Americans, reports ABC. The bodies, which were so badly mutilated that investigators have not been able to determine the gender of all the victims, appeared to have been refrigerated after death. Police believe the slaughter was the work of the Zetas cartel, which is waging a bloody turf war against the Sinaloa cartel in the area. The killings have been linked to the attempted kidnap of 12 people in the area earlier in the week, AP reports. A woman arrested after the victims escaped told investigators the kidnappings where "a repercussion of what happened in Tamaulipas" state, where the corpses of nine men and women were found hanging from a Nuevo Laredo bridge last Friday and the heads of another 14 people were dumped in front of city hall.