KIDNAP victims seized at night in Mexico City and forced to work as slaves were freed by armed police last night. A total of 107 were released after having to work 16 hours a day making shopping bags.
After being bundled into vans they were beaten daily and not allowed to talk for weeks at a time, tormented by guards dubbed “the godfathers”.
One of the victims, Efrain Torres, 36, a cargo loader, said he had been dragged off the streets and bundled into a van several months ago by guards from an establishment that purported to be a rehabilitation centre for alcoholics.
“They didn’t pay us a single peso,” he said last night.
Mexico City’s attorney general said 23 suspects are believed to have acted as guards and overseers at the three- story centre, which had barred doors and windows and was in a poor neighbourhood on the city’s eastern edge.
Mexican government forces have also delivered a major blow to the country’s notorious Zetas drugs cartel, shooting dead its top man in the frontier city of Juarez, close to the border with the United States.
At least 11 other people were killed in two shoot-outs, with seven injured.
Among the dead was the leader of the band, Ricardo Almansa Morales, alias El Gori 1, or Thug Number One.
Last month, Morales killed local security chief General Juan Arturo Esparza and one of his bodyguards.
Poster Comment:
The Zetas worked with the Gulf Cartel. The Sinaloa cartel has been rising in power. They bribed the Mexican army to allow their hit squads past road blocks to execute members of the Juarez cartel. That the Zetas were shot in Juarez would indicate to me that the Juarez cartel is down and almost out as the Zetas began operating on Mexico's other coast.