A high-tech lynching …

A new youtube vido (which I’m not going to post) has surfaced supposedly showing “Zetas” being tortured and confessing to naming various federal and state police and other officials from Quintana Roo and Veracruz involved with the Zetas in a Cuban (or, rather, Cuban-American) smuggling operation.

Joe Reynold’s “NarcoGuerra Times” posted about this story yesterday, but I think Joe seems to be under the impression that the video is from Veracruz State, and not… as I believe… Quintana Roo.  It’s a small matter, but an important one.

The bizarre story from June 2008 of Cuban “indocumentados” being “kidnapped” by Zetas (from Tapachula, Chiapas on the Guatemalan border), did involve the State of Veracruz (where the Cubans who were rounded up said they had been held by their supposed “kidnappers”) but both Mexican and Cuban investigators focused in on what they thought were the centers of a wide-spread operation organized in Miami (by the U.S. government supported “Cuban American National Foundation), which involved smuggling through Cancun.

The men in the video are presumably some of those who were found outside Merida (the capital of Quintana Roo) with their heads chopped off.  Shortly thereafter, two Cubans were arrested in connection with the crime and at the time, I wrote what I considered the most plausible explaination for this murder … exile Cuban death squads getting rid of their patsies makes more sense to me.

Given that just a couple of weeks ago, what appears to be a death squad using the name “Mata Zetas” appeared in Cancun… it’s tempting to think this is the same group.  What’s scary is that these guys mimic a police interrogation video so closely — from the hooded, uniformed guards to the off-camera interrogator to even the shirtless (presumably to document for the court that no physical torture was performed) “perps”… or, maybe it was filmed by police officers acting extra-judicially.

My point is that Quintana Roo seems a more likely spot for something like this to happen.  Veracruz may have cultural ties to Cuba, but Cancun and Miami have much closer business ties (and Cuba is closer to Quintana Roo than Veracruz), including shady business. American gangsters (including Cuban-American gangsters) go where the money is… and there’s more money (and more opportunity for laundering money) in Cancun than in Veracruz.

Death Squads are usually associated with the extreme right.  There are rightists in Veracruz, to be sure, but a lot more of them among the shadier figures in  Miami’s Cuban community (most of whom are perfectly respectable people, naturally)… and Miami has become a Mecca for all kinds of rightist Latin American organizations.

If, however, NarcoGuerra News is correct, and this death squad (or another death squad) is ALSO working in Veracruz, that is even more disturbing.