How DEA Informers Sparked a Massacre of Anyone with the Wrong Last Name in Mexico Andrea Noel - The Daily Beast
go to original November 26, 2016

In March, 2011 Los Zetas Cartel reigned a week of terror in Piedras Negras and los Cinco Manantiales which includes:  Allende, Morelos, Zaragoza, Villa Union and Nava. (Borderland Beat)

Across the border from Texas in the state of Coahuila, in the Five Springs or Cinco Manantiales region, hundreds of townspeople were abducted and brutally massacred in the spring of 2011.

That year in mid-March, heavily armed commandos burst into these towns with a long list of targets, leaving destroyed homes and businesses in their wake as evidence of their crimes. First, though, they let at least one mayor know what was about to happen.

For years, the massacre went uninvestigated and officially unconfirmed, but the locals who remained behind guarded the memory of their missing-and-presumed-dead by fearfully whispering their versions of events among each other. Survivors shared stories of the explosions they heard that week in mid-March, and the destruction they witnessed. But piles of rubble sat unprodded by authorities.

Many of the roughly 300 victims - more than 80 separate families - did not know each other, but most had something in common, beyond calling the same region home. They shared a combination of the same common last names: Garza, Gaytán, Moreno, and Villanueva.

Over the course of three days, the Zetas cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful crime syndicates allied with corrupted authorities, terrorized the region, sweeping up anyone who shared the ill-fated names, and anyone who worked for them or with them, abducting dozens of families while looting and destroying their homes.

Others among the missing were people who did not bear those family names, but who rented properties with these surnames quaintly featured by their door frames. Family employees - maids, cooks, landscapers, and those tending to the ranches’ animals - were not spared. Nor were mere bystanders.

The missing became the massacred, but the Zetas did not find the two men they were looking for: José Luis Garza Gaytán and Héctor Moreno Villanueva.

Those two Zeta underlings, whom the Zetas accused of stealing millions, had doomed hundreds who shared their last names to death, while retreating into the protective arms of the U.S. government as informants for the Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States, the DEA.

Read the rest at The Daily Beast

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