Mexico Drug Cartel Violence: Body Of Decapitated Woman Discovered On Mexico City Metro Stuffed In Suitcase

Mexico City police say the body of a woman whose head and hands had been cut off was discovered in a suitcase left in a metro station of the Mexican capital on Sunday night. According to officials, metro users at the San Antonio stop in the neighborhood of Benito Juárez near the city’s historic center had alerted authorities to a suspicious bag which had been left partly open at the foot of the metro stairs, with what appeared to be a note protruding from it. Jesús Rodriguez Almeida, the city’s Secretary of Public Security, told Milenio that an investigation is being carried out into the possible identity of the victim.

The note recovered with the bag points to the involvement of La Familia Michoacana, a drug cartel based in the southwestern state of Michoacán but with tentacles extending into the Mexican capital. According to Reforma, an excerpt from the police report reads: “Personnel from the Public Ministry finds a written message on a white poster board with black letters: ‘don’t steal from the Familia Michoacana’” with a threat addressed to another named person. Reforma writes that the victim appeared to be a woman between 25 and 35 years of age. Videos from the metro system’s cameras could not ascertain the identity of the person who left the bag other than that it appeared to be a male.

Mexico City has largely remained free of the drug-related violence that in recent years engulfed many of Mexico’s northern and southwestern states and continues to plague them. But residents of the capital were shaken this past spring when 13 youths from the down-at-the-heels neighborhood of Tepito, in the city’s center, were kidnapped from an after-hours bar in La Zona Rosa, a nightlife district. Their bodies were recovered later in the summer in a grave on a ranch east of Mexico City. Police say only two of the youths had been targeted by the drug gang responsible -- as the youths’ parents were members of a rival gang -- while the other 11 had simply found themselves caught up.