Alarming number of Americans are vanishing in Mexico where there has been a dramatic increase in the numbers of U.S. citizens

Alarming number of Americans are vanishing in Mexico where there has been a dramatic increase in the numbers of U.S. citizens who have recently been reported missing or kidnapped along the border with Mexico, reports the Washington Post. Many who have vanished from U.S. cities are still missing and it is feared they will turn up in the mass graves that have been discovered lately in Mexico.U.S. State Dept recently issued Mexico alert said “Recent Mexican army and police force conflicts with heavily-armed narcotics cartels have escalated to levels equivalent to military small-unit combat and have included use of machine guns and fragmentation grenades. Confrontations have taken place in numerous towns and cities in northern Mexico, including Tijuana in the Mexican state of Baja California, and Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua. The situation in northern Mexico remains very fluid; the location and timing of future armed engagements there cannot be predicted”. Public shootouts have occurred during daylight hours near shopping areas in many Mexican border towns. In Ciudad Juarez the body of a man who had been beheaded and whose hands were handcuffed behind him was found hung from the Rotario Bridge in Juarez across the border from El Paso Texas. He had been forcibly kidnapped and carried off two days before according to police. A message from a local criminal organization was left nearby. The gruesome display even for this northern border city long accustomed to drug-related violence was shocked.
Shortly after the grisly sighting about 5 a.m., police found the victim’s head in a black bag in a nearby plaza, said state police spokesman Alejandro Pariente.
Pariente said the body was wearing black jeans, a red T-shirt and white sneakers, and was handcuffed. A banner apparently directed at rival drug-gang members was hung next to the corpse.The victim’s father was barely able to identify his 23-year-old sons body. Yet one more body was found near the Rio Grande in Juarez, this one shot in the head.Elsewhere, masked men gunned down two police officers in a convenience store in Chihuahua City, the capital of Chihuahua state, where Juarez is located, said Eduardo Esparza, spokesman for the state attorney general’s office. After the killings assailants left a toy pig next to the bodies. A man wearing a pig mask was found hung in a residence in Juarez. Near the body was a message threatening to do the same to others. Police believe the message was from drug gangs.Drug violence has been escalating across Mexico and cartels have turned to increasingly gruesome methods to send a message to their rivals and police.Also in Juarez, the same day four men were found shot to death. And four other men fell victim to gunfire attacks in various places in the city.Elsewhere in town, the cadaver of a man was found hanging from a metal fence in front of an empty house. A mask with the face of a pig had been placed over his head and his hands had been cuffed. There was also a threatening “narco-message” left with the hanged body.Later the same day Mexican army personnel detained four heavily armed men in Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua the four had with them “an anti-tank rocket launcher, a high explosive rocket, two caliber 308 rifles capable of piercing armor, two cal. 223 AR-15 rifles, a caliber 556 rifle, a .22 caliber rifle, a .22 revolver, a caliber 11.25 pistol, 12 fragmentation hand grenades, a gas grenade and clips of various calibers.” They also had five “͋ level bullet proof vests, bandoleers, gas masks and ID cards of the PGR (Mex. Dep’t. of Justice) plus small amounts of drugs. Most of the front page and the headline on the printed version of a Juarez paper were devoted to the horror which Juarez residents feel because of the level and brutality of all the violence.Tijuana violence does not cease there either it is becoming an everyday affair according to Jose Gonzalez a resident of Tijuana were there is more violence reported and where the finding of cadavers and narco messages keep police agencies on alert on both sides of the border and the civilian population in a state of panic.In Tijuana alone there have been to date more than 700 execution type killings carried out by organized crime that have been counted this year, which makes it one of the most violent in the city’s history. Recently in TJ two more decapitated bodies were found, two police officers were murdered and so were eleven other men, all within a 14 hour period.
In a banner headlines on the printed front page of a TJ newspaper read: City policeman executed Physician kidnapped. A second “ministerial police” agent lost his life Wednesday afternoon in TJ. He was driving his car when the occupants of two other vehicles opened fire killing him dead in his car. Two severed human heads were left on top of the lids of each of two blue plastic barrels found near the Otay Mesa border crossing point on the east side of TJ near the California border. The location is just four blocks away from where six persons were killed by gunfire on Monday. The headless bodies were inside the barrels, and a narco message.A “Ministerial Police” commander was killed and his police officer escort was critically wounded Monday afternoon when killers shot them repeatedly while the two were eating at a restaurant. The hit-men left and disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. Recently four men fell victim to a gunfire assault at a junkyard in the Lomas Verdes section of TJ but between 4 p.m. and late evening six other men were shot to death and two others were wounded in two other incidents elsewhere in town.Just yesterday, ten gunmen lost their lives after a shootout with state agents in Nogales, Sonora. The police were attacked with fragmentation grenades; three police and three civilians were wounded.The body of a gagged man was found in Cabo San Lucas his fingers had been chopped off. Eight persons have died in Baja California Norte in the last 24 hours, the product of a spiral of violence.
Just recently two Rosarito police officers were assassinated while on patrol. Twenty kilometers away three other persons were murdered. Seven other crimes took place in Chihuahua two men were found dead in Hermosillo, Sonora, two in Culiacan and “some others more” in Guanajuato, Guerrero, the Distrito Federal and Taxco.
A related account in “El Universal” (Mexico City) states that violence in Rosarito has cost the lives of seven police and at least a dozen other persons in less than thirty days; it adds that there have been mass resignations of police there because of fear of being murdered. Just some years back Rosarito was a laid back, peaceful ocean beach town.Just recently Baja racer Arron Cooper another American was shot in Mexico while pre-running the Baja 1000 race.