Police, bus companies failed to act as graves filled in Tamaulipas

There were clues but nothing was done, and now at least 177 bodies have been unearthed. Demand grows for dismissing the state's elected but apparently ineffective officials.

By Tracy Wilkinson,
Los Angeles Times
April 25, 2011

Reporting from Matamoros, Mexico

Suitcases started piling up, unclaimed, at the depot where buses crossing northern Tamaulipas state ended their route. That should have been an early clue.

Then the bodies started piling up, pulled by forensic workers from two dozen hidden graves in the scruffy brush-covered ravines around the town of San Fernando, 80 miles south of this city that borders Brownsville, Texas.

At least 177 corpses have been recovered in the last few weeks, most of them, officials now say, passengers snatched from interstate buses, tortured and slaughtered. Women were raped before being killed, and some victims were burned alive, according to accounts from survivors who eventually overcame their fears and came forward.

The slayings have horrified a Mexican public already awash in violence and led commentators to call them "our Auschwitz" and a "Mexican genocide."

(Original here.)