Six men have been murdered and dismembered in a rural area of the western Mexican state of Michoacán, in an attack that police believe could be bloody revenge from a rival drug cartel.
The six mutilated bodies were located on Wednesday and all suffered severe torture marks.
All victims were dismembered and forensic teams presume they were killed by asphyxiation, The Rio Times report.
Investigators say their main line of enquiry is the possibility that the brutal attack was the result of revenge between drug trafficking cartels, something that is happening regularly in Michoacan.
Authorities have confirmed that all six brutalised bodies have been sent to the Forensic Medical Service (Semefo) and are awaiting to be identified by their relatives.
There is reportedly a serious wave of regular violence between drug cartels looking to realign and settle in new locations around the state.
The regions of Tierra Caliente, Costa, and Bajio are thought to be hot spots for violence between drug traffickers.
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Marijuana, 'poppy' and methamphetamine are reportedly the main drugs that are being produced and trafficked around the area.
The vicious attack comes just months before Alfredo Ramirez Bedolla takes office on October 1 as governor of the state after winning the elections on June 6.
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Elsewhere in Mexico, the Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán has been in prison for five years – but the gang's drug business seems to be thriving more than ever before.
The cartel leader has been imprisoned in a US "supermax" prison since 2017, serving a life sentence after being found guilty of all 10 federal charges he faced.
But according to official US data, security analysts, and some of his lawyers, the business has never been better for his gang despite the "significant victory and milestone" of his arrest.
Mexico's most powerful cartel slaughter El Chapo commander and his bodyguards in ambush
Cocaine raids in the US jumped from more than 52,000 pounds in 2016 to more than 62,000 pounds the following year.
By 2020, 58,006 pounds of cocaine were seized in the US. As of April, the total for 2021 was 62,324 pounds, leaving authorities to wonder if the chief's capture made any difference at all.
A senior analyst in Mexico for the International Crisis Group, Falko Ernst, said that seeing the arrest or killing of cartel leaders like Guzmán as a blow to those cartels is misleading and leads to bad policies.
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