In September 2006, gunmen opened the doors of the Sol y Sombra discotheque in Uruapan, in the western Mexican state of Michoacan, and threw five human heads onto the dance floor.
As frightened partygoers looked on, the gang left a scrawled message at the scene, announcing the arrival of a new, breakaway drug cartel called La Familia Michoacana, and walked out as coolly as they had entered.
For many, it represented a shocking new degree of brutality by the country's drug traffickers. It made headlines around the world.
Francisco Castellanos is the correspondent for the respected Mexican magazine, Proceso, in Michoacan.
He sees the 2006 beheadings as a game-changing moment in the conflict:
"The five were local drug dealers in Uruapan", he says in an email from the embattled Pacific state, adding that the hastily-written threat left at the crime scene spoke of "divine justice".
"It generated great fear and terror", remembers Mr Castellanos, "and then investors started to leave for more secure areas."
Coded killings
"In the 1990s, the cartels didn't cut the heads off their victims", says Samuel Gonzalez Ruiz, a former advisor to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
"They used different codes of murder which were more or less established between the criminals," Mr Gonzalez Ruiz says.
He tells of a well-known hitman who sent out messages by the different ways he shot his victims.
A bullet to the back of the head, for example, meant the victim was a traitor, a bullet to the temple signified he was a member of a rival gang.
Now, however, beheading is a tactic often employed by Mexican drug organisations, in particular by the vast criminal network Los Zetas and their two main rivals, the Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel.
Such a violent form of execution is generally associated with the sort of radical Islamist groups who killed US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or British civil engineer Kenneth Bigley in Iraq.
Cult of death
But the Mexican context is very different, says Mr Gonzalez Ruiz. He argues the practice comes from Guatemala:
"In 2000, the Zetas began to extend their reach into Central America, and they incorporated into their ranks members of the elite jungle squad, the Kaibiles.
In September 2006, gunmen opened the doors of the Sol y Sombra discotheque in Uruapan, in the western Mexican state of Michoacan, and threw five human heads onto the dance floor.
As frightened partygoers looked on, the gang left a scrawled message at the scene, announcing the arrival of a new, breakaway drug cartel called La Familia Michoacana, and walked out as coolly as they had entered.
For many, it represented a shocking new degree of brutality by the country's drug traffickers. It made headlines around the world.
Francisco Castellanos is the correspondent for the respected Mexican magazine, Proceso, in Michoacan.
He sees the 2006 beheadings as a game-changing moment in the conflict:
"The five were local drug dealers in Uruapan", he says in an email from the embattled Pacific state, adding that the hastily-written threat left at the crime scene spoke of "divine justice".
"It generated great fear and terror", remembers Mr Castellanos, "and then investors started to leave for more secure areas."
Coded killings
"In the 1990s, the cartels didn't cut the heads off their victims", says Samuel Gonzalez Ruiz, a former advisor to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
"They used different codes of murder which were more or less established between the criminals," Mr Gonzalez Ruiz says.
He tells of a well-known hitman who sent out messages by the different ways he shot his victims.
A bullet to the back of the head, for example, meant the victim was a traitor, a bullet to the temple signified he was a member of a rival gang.
Now, however, beheading is a tactic often employed by Mexican drug organisations, in particular by the vast criminal network Los Zetas and their two main rivals, the Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel.
Such a violent form of execution is generally associated with the sort of radical Islamist groups who killed US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or British civil engineer Kenneth Bigley in Iraq.
Cult of death
But the Mexican context is very different, says Mr Gonzalez Ruiz. He argues the practice comes from Guatemala:
"In 2000, the Zetas began to extend their reach into Central America, and they incorporated into their ranks members of the elite jungle squad, the Kaibiles.
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