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The Tula massacre was a 1982 massacre near the municipality of Atotonilco de Tula in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, north of Mexico City, where 13 Colombian men were murdered. The incident resulted in a minor political scandal, though no one was ever convicted in relation to the crime.[ citation needed ]
On 14 January 1982, the bodies of 13 men were found on the borders of a drainage canal in the Tula River. There was a doubt about the sexual identity of one of the victims, who could have been a woman dressed in men's clothing.[ citation needed ]
The bodies showed signs of torture and mutilation, some of them with their heads in plastic bags. Some were decapitated, while others were slashed with machetes, and most with a shot to the head. The facts of the massacre were denounced by J. Gonzales Gonzales, who accused his boss, Arturo Durazo Moreno, the then Mexico City Police chief, of being the intellectual author of the crime. Durazo was the chief of police in Mexico City during the administration of his friend, President José López Portillo.
The dead, apparently all Colombians, formed a band of criminals who were exploited by Durazo. Durazo allegedly hid them in jail and released them to rob banks repeatedly. It was said[ by whom? ] that Durazo decided to keep the loot and do away with the Colombians and their Mexican taxi driver, who also disappeared, last seen in June 1981 by his mother. It was said that the group were held in secret jails and the La Castañeda psychiatric hospital, tortured and murdered them, and then dumped them into a sewer in Mexico City. Their decomposed remains were later fished out of the Tula River by a Red Cross diving team.[ citation needed ]
Durazo was considered[ by whom? ] to be corrupt, incompetent, and criminal. Portillo, put up with it because they were childhood friends.[ citation needed ] Durazo fled Mexico in 1982 following the election of a new president and investigations into police corruption. He returned some time later and died in August 2000 in Acapulco, Guerrero.
The pictures of the 13 dead and partial information of the crime was published by ¡Alarma! , an explicit Mexico City publication that deals in images of mutilated and deformed human bodies.
José Guillermo Abel López Portillo y Pacheco was a Mexican writer, lawyer, and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who served as the 58th president of Mexico from 1976 to 1982. López Portillo was the only official candidate in the 1976 presidential election, being the only president in recent Mexican history to win an election unopposed.
Human rights in Mexico refers to moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour in Mexico, and are regularly protected as legal rights in municipal and international law. The problems include torture, extrajudicial killings and summary executions, police repression, sexual murder, and, more recently, news reporter assassinations.
Maury Troy Travis was an American serial killer. Travis was named in a federal criminal complaint for the murders of two women. At the time of the murders, he was a hotel waiter, and on parole for a 1989 robbery. While Travis claimed in a letter to have murdered 17 women, some authorities were doubtful; others thought he may have murdered up to 20 women. He committed suicide by hanging in custody in St. Louis County, Missouri, after being arrested for murder.
Crime is one of the most urgent concerns facing Mexico, as Mexican drug trafficking rings play a major role in the flow of cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, heroin, and marijuana transiting between Latin America and the United States. Drug trafficking has led to corruption, which has had a deleterious effect on Mexico's Federal Representative Republic. Drug trafficking and organized crime have been a major source of violent crime. Drug cartels and gangs have also branched out to conduct alternative illegal activities for profit, including sex trafficking in Mexico. Some of the most increasingly violent states in Mexico in 2020 included Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Michoacán, Jalisco, and Querétaro. Some of the world's most violent cities are reportedly within the state of Guanajuato with extortion from criminal groups now being commonplace. The state of Zacatecas is said to be valuable to multiple organized crime groups for drug trafficking, specifically methamphetamine to the United States. As of 2021, Michoacán is experiencing increased instances of extortion and kidnapping due to a growing presence and escalation in the armed conflicts between CJNG and Cárteles Unidos on regions bordering the neighboring state of Jalisco. CJNG is also currently battling the Los Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel in the North Mexican region of Sonora.
Vernon C. "Verne" Miller was a freelance Prohibition hitman, bootlegger, bank robber and the disgraced former sheriff of Beadle County, South Dakota. Most infamously, Miller, as the only identified gunman in the Kansas City massacre, was found beaten and strangled to death shortly after the incident.
Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, commonly referred to by his aliases El Jefe de Jefes and El Padrino, is a convicted Mexican drug kingpin who was one of the founders of the Guadalajara Cartel, which controlled much of the drug trafficking in Mexico and the corridors along the Mexico–United States border in the 1980s.
The Guadalajara Cartel, also known as The Federation, was a Mexican drug cartel which was formed in the late 1970s by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero, and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo in order to ship cocaine and marijuana to the United States. Among the first of the Mexican drug trafficking groups to work with the Colombian cocaine mafias, the Guadalajara Cartel prospered from the cocaine trade. Throughout the 1980s, the cartel controlled much of the drug trafficking in Mexico and the corridors along the Mexico–United States border. It had operations in various regions in Mexico which included the states of Jalisco, Baja California, Colima, Sonora, Chihuahua and Sinaloa among others. Multiple modern present day drug cartels such as the Tijuana, Juárez and Sinaloa cartels originally started out as branches or "plazas" of the Guadalajara Cartel before its eventual disintegration.
The Banda della Magliana was an Italian criminal organization based in Rome. It was founded in 1975. Given by the media, the name refers to the original neighborhood, the Magliana, of some of its members.
Milan Lukić is a Bosnian Serb war criminal who led the White Eagles paramilitary group during the Bosnian War. He was found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in July 2009 of crimes against humanity and violations of war customs committed in the Višegrad municipality of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian war and sentenced to life in prison.
The Mexican drug war, known also as Calderón's war is an ongoing asymmetric armed conflict between the Mexican government and various drug trafficking syndicates. When the Mexican military intervened in 2006, the government's main objective was to reduce drug-related violence. The Mexican government has asserted that their primary focus is dismantling the cartels and preventing drug trafficking. The conflict has been described as the Mexican theater of the global war on drugs, as led by the United States federal government.
A copycat crime is a criminal act that is modeled after or inspired by a previous crime. It notably occurs after exposure to media content depicting said crimes, and/or a live criminal model.
Crime and violence affect the lives of millions of people in Latin America. Some consider social inequality to be a major contributing factor to levels of violence in Latin America, where the state fails to prevent crime and organized crime takes over State control in areas where the State is unable to assist the society such as in impoverished communities. In the years following the transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, crime and violence have become major problems in Latin America. The region experienced more than 2.5 million murders between 2000 and 2017. Several studies indicated the existence of an epidemic in the region; the Pan American Health Organization called violence in Latin America "the social pandemic of the 20th century." Apart from the direct human cost, the rise in crime and violence has imposed significant social costs and has made much more difficult the processes of economic and social development, democratic consolidation and regional integration in the Americas.
Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, commonly known as "El Güero Palma", is a Mexican former drug trafficker and leader of the Sinaloa Cartel alongside Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. After his boss Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo ordered the brutal murder of his family, Palma set out to avenge them. Palma was arrested on June 23, 1995, and extradited to the United States, where he served a jail sentence until June 2016. He was then deported back to Mexico and charged with a double homicide for murdering two Nayarit police officers in 1995. Palma is currently incarcerated at the Altiplano Prison near Mexico City.
A drug lord, drug baron, kingpin, or lord of drugs is a type of crime boss in charge of a drug trafficking network, organization, or enterprise.
Social cleansing is social group-based killing that consists of the elimination of members of society who are considered "undesirable", including, but not limited to, the homeless, criminals, street children, the elderly, the poor, the weak, the sick, the needy and the disabled. This phenomenon is caused by a combination of economic and social factors, but killings are notably present in regions with high levels of poverty and disparities of wealth. Perpetrators are usually of the same community as the victims and they are often motivated by the idea that the victims are a drain on the resources of society. Efforts by national and local governments to stop these killings have been largely ineffective. The government and police forces are often involved in the killings, especially in Africa, Asia, and South America.
Arturo "El Negro" Durazo Moreno was the Chief of Police in Mexico City for six years, from 1976 to 1982. He was arrested in 1984 and incarcerated on multiple counts of corruption, extortion, tax evasion, smuggling and possession of illegal weapons and cocaine trade kickbacks.
Barrio Azteca, or Los Aztecas, is a Mexican-American street and prison gang originally based in El Paso, Texas, USA and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. The gang was formed in the Coffield Unit, located near Tennessee Colony, Texas by Jose "Raulio" Rivera, a prisoner from El Paso, in the early 1980s. It expanded into a transnational criminal organization that traded mainly across the US-Mexico border. Currently one of the most violent gangs in the United States, they are said to have over 3,000 members across the country in locations such as New Mexico, Texas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania as well as at least 5,000 members in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Crime in Venezuela is widespread, with violent crimes such as murder and kidnapping increasing for several years. In 2014, the United Nations attributed crime to the poor political and economic environment in the country—which, at the time, had the second highest murder rate in the world. Rates of crime rapidly began to increase during the presidency of Hugo Chávez due to the institutional instability of his Bolivarian government, underfunding of police resources, and severe inequality. Chávez's government sought a cultural hegemony by promoting class conflict and social fragmentation, which in turn encouraged "criminal gangs to kill, kidnap, rob and extort". Upon Chávez's death in 2013, Venezuela was ranked the most insecure nation in the world by Gallup.
On Tuesday, November 12, 1914, John Evans, a black man, was lynched in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States, by a mob of 1,500 white men, women and children. Evans was accused of the murder of Edward Sherman, a white real estate developer, and the attack of Sherman's wife, Mary. After word of the attack spread, and Mary Sherman claimed her attackers were "two negroes," a citywide search ensued. Suspicions immediately led to John Evans. Two days after the murder, a posse consisting of some of the city's most prominent and well-respected members stormed the St. Petersburg jail, threw a noose around Evans' neck and marched him to his death. He was never given a fair trial. Evans was hanged from a light post on the corner of Ninth Street South and Second Avenue. At first, he kept himself alive by wrapping his legs around the light pole. An unidentified white woman in a nearby automobile ended his struggle with a single bullet. Though the shot was fatal, the rest of the crowd began shooting at Evans' dangling body until their ammunition was depleted.
Since the beginning of the Mexican Drug War in 2006, many women, of Mexican and other nationalities, have been victims of extortion, rape, torture, and murder, as well as forced disappearance, by belligerents on all sides. Women have been sex trafficked in Mexico by the cartels and gangs. The criminal organizations, in turn, use the profits to buy weapons and expand. They have harmed and carried out sexual assault of migrants from Latin America to the United States. The violence against women in the drug war has spread beyond Mexico to bordering and nearby countries in Central America and North America. The number of women killed in the conflict is unknown because of the lack of data. Women officials, judges, lawyers, paralegals, reporters, business owners, social media influencers, teachers, and non-governmental organizations directors have also been involved in the conflict in different capacities. There have been female combatants in the military, police, cartels, and gangs. Women have lost loved ones in the conflict.