Political Report # 1304 DEA Operation Played Hidden Role in the Disappearance of Five Innocent Mexicans

By Ginger Thompson, ProPublica

At about 2 a.m. on April 21, 2010, a convoy of gunmen working for the Zetas drug cartel, one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in the world, rolled into Monterrey, Mexico, a wealthy, bustling city considered that country's commercial capital. With brazen efficiency, they set up roadblocks at all major thoroughfares, then sent a convoy of sport utility vehicles downtown, encircling a Holiday Inn. The heavily armed men, some wearing ski masks, swarmed into the hotel's lobby and rushed directly to the fifth floor, bursting into every room and rousting the guests from their beds. The gunmen questioned the guests, then separated four of them from the rest: a marketing executive at an eyewear company, a chemical engineer for a cosmetics manufacturer, a shoe salesman expecting his first child, and a college professor who was the mother of two. Then the four were loaded, along with the hotel's receptionist, into the gunmen's vehicles and driven away. None of the hostages has been seen since. All are presumed dead. For years, their relatives and friends begged for answers. Why were their loved ones -- ordinary middle-class Mexicans with no known criminal ties -- targeted in this spasm of drug violence? The marketing executive's family futilely negotiated and paid a ransom before the Zetas cut off contact. "We could never figure out why they were taken. What made them so important?" said David Anabitarte, the marketing executive's supervisor and one of his best friends. "It was hard to accept what had happened because it never made any sense." Mexican authorities initially insinuated that the victims had brought on their own demise, adding insult to grief. The college professor, they alleged, may have been involved in a romantic relationship with one of the Zetas' rivals. And they speculated that the marketing executive, who had managed to lift his family into the upper middle class, might have had some connection to the drug trade. Without any credible explanations for why the Zetas would move military-style through a major metropolitan city to kidnap random guests at a budget hotel, some of the people close to the victims began to believe that too.

Political Report # 1215 Remember El Mozote

By Micah Uetricht & Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

A memorial to those killed located in El Mozote, El Salvador. Archbishop Romero Trust The new issue of Jacobin is out now. To mark its release, we're offering discounted introductory subscriptions. "Which son of a bitch says that?" It was December 11, 1981 in El Mozote, a small town in El Salvador, and the major wanted to know which one of his men had refused to kill the children. The military had just spent an entire day murdering its hundreds of inhabitants. Now, just the town's kids were left. Gathered outside a schoolhouse in which a number of the children were being kept, the soldiers had had an argument. Some didn't want to kill the kids, many of whom were under twelve years old and some of whom were infants. The major, without hesitation, walked over, scooped a little boy from a crowd of kids, flung him into the air, and speared him with a bayonet as he came back down. There was no more arguing. The boy was one of over eight hundred slaughtered that day and the next, thirty-five years ago. El Mozote was neither the first nor the last mass atrocity in El Salvador's nightmarish civil war. The rape and murder of four US churchwomen by the National Guard, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero while he held mass, the massacre of at least three hundred civilians at Sumpúl River, a similar mass killing a year later at Lempa River, the execution-style murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America - the list of horrors goes on and on, and is so long and brutal that it risks overshadowing the daily dumpings of bullet- and torture-riddled bodies of those who dared to speak out against the hard-right government on city streets and in public parks during the Salvadoran Civil War, which stretched from 1980 to 1992.

Political Report #1097, CIA Asked to Release Documents Related to Massacre in El Salvador By Carmen Rodriguez, Americas Program

Colonel Perez Ochoa and Col. Domingo Monterrosa. Monterrosa ordered the slaughter of El Mozote. Photo courtesy of Giovanni Palazzo, Italian photographer who covered the armed conflict in El Salvador. By Carmen Rodriguez, Americas Program

The wounds of war have still not healed in El Salvador. Twenty-three years after the peace treaty, victims of the armed conflict are still waiting for justice and looking for their missing loved ones.