In six years, more than 2,500 of these messages were registered and in 752 of these cases, there were murdered people.
The terror tactics of criminal organizations in Mexico no longer stop at hanging a narco banner in public. Now, this fear strategy is often accompanied by people murdered next to these messages.
An investigation by MILENIO reveals that mafias leave a corpse under every three narco banners. And in the city of Fresnillo, Zacatecas, they leave a body next to each bloody message.
In Veracruz and Zacatecas, there are hundreds of cases; in Quintana Roo and Tabasco, security authorities report dozens of these episodes.
According to information provided by state prosecutors and security secretariats, from December 2018 to August 2024, 2,531 seizures of narco banners were recorded in 20 states of the Republic.
During that same period, 752 corpses were reported found next to or near these messages from Mexican mafias.
Which state has the most narco-banners?
The state that registered the highest number of narco-banners in the last six years was Quintana Roo, with 1,344 messages attributed to criminal organizations, while the entity that reported the most cases of homicides near a message with these characteristics was Zacatecas, with 330 cases.
David Saucedo, a security consultant, commented that narco-banners function for criminal groups as a mechanism of narco-terrorism against antagonistic criminal organizations, especially in the dispute over places or territories, and highlights that if these messages are accompanied by corpses “the narrative of terror is strengthened.”
Another type of narco-banners –he adds– “are directed at authorities, especially at commanders of police corporations or at police officers on foot, in which death threats are issued, especially so that they abandon security in certain areas or stop investigating crimes.”
“There are also narco-banners that use pig heads, which are mainly used to threaten public security authorities at all three levels of government, or to point out alleged links between these authorities and organized crime,” he notes.
Zacatecas and Veracruz, more corpses
The cases of Zacatecas and Veracruz are significant in this phenomenon. In these states, the number of corpses found near narco-banners is almost the same or more than half of the mafia messages seized by the authorities. In Zacatecas, for example, of the 382 narco-banners seized, 330 were accompanied by a body.
In Veracruz, 392 banners belonging to criminal groups were found during that period and the number of corpses near these messages was 284.
Although some state security and law enforcement authorities who responded to MILENIO’s information requests did not break down by year the number of corpses near these messages from criminal groups, the period with the highest number of cases was 2020, with 86 incidents.
2021 follows with 72; from January to July 2024, 69 bodies have been found; in 2023, there were 65 discoveries, and in 2019, 64 cases were reported.
The years that recorded the lowest number of cases were 2022, with 36 reports, and in December 2018, 13 such incidents occurred.
The Zacatecas municipality of Fresnillo is the municipality that reports the most bodies found near a narco message, with 70 cases. It is followed, in descending order, by two other municipalities in that entity: the capital, with 57 findings of corpses, and Guadalupe, with 34 homicides within the perimeter of location of these messages on public roads.
The fourth place is occupied by the municipality of Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, with 31 cases, and in fifth place is the municipality of Benito Juárez (Cancún), Quintana Roo, with 22 cases of people murdered near narco banners.
In Quintana Roo, there are plenty of banners
As for the five municipalities where the largest number of narco-banners were seized between 2018 and 2024, all are municipalities in the state of:
Quintana Roo: Benito Juárez (Cancún) with 506 messages; Solidaridad, with 401; Othón P. Blanco (Chetumal), with 100; Cozumel, with 99, and Bacalar, with 96.
Sixth place is occupied by Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, with 86; seventh is the city of Zacatecas, with 77; eighth is Fresnillo, Zacatecas, with 75; The ninth was Tulum, Quintana Roo, with 66, and the tenth was Villahermosa, Tabasco, with 51.
Although the requests for information via transparency required the name of the criminal groups that claimed the placement of the narco-banners and the murders they perpetrated and placed near these messages, only the states of Tamaulipas and Puebla complied with the request in their respective responses.
The Tamaulipas Public Security Secretariat indicated that of the 47 narco-banners seized from December 2018 to August 2024, “18 were signed with the initials CDN (Cartel del Noreste), 13 with the initials CDG (Cartel del Golfo), one with the initials ZVE (Zetas Vieja Escuela) and 15 were not specified.”
In the case of Puebla, the Public Security Secretariat of that entity reports that of the five messages from mafias registered in the last six years, all in 2024, the organized crime groups referred to are “Michoacanos”, on a narco banner seized in the municipality of Amozoc.
“Malverde”, in the Tepexi de Rodríguez municipality; “Commander Zaka. C.H.”, in the city of Puebla; “La Nueva Línea de Guerrero”, in the municipality of Tehuacán, and “Sangre Nueva”, in the municipality of Teziutlán.
In this regard, David Saucedo stated that a very alarming issue is that in this type of “narco terrorism narratives” it is observed that “they went beyond the old dynamic of staying only in a message in public roads, even if it was made of fabrics or sheets, and that they only remained as a threat or warning.”
“Now these messages are spread through social networks, in photographs or videos, but also the murdered people are shown next to these cardboards or banners made in printing presses, where it’s increasingly common to see decapitated, severed bodies with visible signs of torture or hanging from bridges.”
States that didn’t cooperate with the investigation
The state prosecutors and security secretariats that refused to provide this information or that passed the buck to the Attorney General’s Office, arguing that these are crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of the federal courts, were:
Guanajuato, Durango, Aguascalientes, Querétaro, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Michoacán, Guerrero, Colima, Campeche and Mexico City.
Source: Milenio
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