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Author: Subject: Rosarito Beach- YIKES!!!
Bob H
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[*] posted on 6-23-2006 at 06:24 PM


Quote:
Originally posted by Hook
Quote:
Originally posted by Dave
Gringos: Those who aren't packing are emulating the ostrich.


What do you suggest we bring down, Dave, to match the firepower of 70 guys with AK-47s? :?:

I think I'll emulate a chameleon and bring something down that seems to protect those close to the action.

Maybe a Hobart meat slicer.............????


Bring down the non-toxic stuff that kills ants!
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[*] posted on 6-23-2006 at 07:11 PM


Quote:
Originally posted by Baja Bernie
Did anyone read the two links I provided on something that is far scarier than four cops getting their hair parted.

That is American gangs who are enlisting in the Marines so that they can learn new weapons and military tactics that no police department can stand up against.

Talk about heads in the sand.


I read it . the Marines will straiten the out. boy are they in for a surprise.:lol::lol:




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[*] posted on 6-23-2006 at 08:01 PM
Bruce


and so are those who continue to place their heads in the sand---Perhaps that is best--how do you cut off the head when it is buried.

The Monguls knew! And guess what--they are from the same area as the Al Quida.




My smidgen of a claim to fame is that I have had so many really good friends. By Bernie Swaim December 2007
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[*] posted on 6-24-2006 at 12:54 PM
Mexico's Cartels Escalate Drug War


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-behead23...

Gangs enlist militias, whose tactics include beheadings, in battles over smuggling routes.

By Richard Marosi
June 23, 2006

TIJUANA ? The caller painted an ominous scene: A convoy of 40 vehicles carrying 70 heavily armed and masked men was prowling the streets of Rosarito Beach on Tuesday evening. The three police officers who arrived were quickly abducted. The next morning, their mutilated bodies turned up in an empty lot.

Their heads were found in the Tijuana River later that day.

The assault is believed to be one of the largest in Baja California, and is the latest in a series of precisely executed paramilitary operations that have beset Mexican cities as drug cartels escalate their battles to control key smuggling routes.

With Mexican authorities relying more heavily on the military to combat drug smuggling, traffickers have responded in kind, forming large forces of assailants and arming them with frightening arrays of weaponry.

In April, nearly two dozen heavily armed men tried to assassinate Baja California's top-ranking public safety official in a shootout on a Mexicali street. The attackers fired grenades and more than 600 rounds from assault weapons, wounding three bodyguards.

Over the last year, commando-style raids have been regular occurrences in Tijuana, with convoys of masked gunmen snatching victims from restaurants and street corners in brazen daylight raids.

"It's a disturbing manifestation of the latest drug war frenzy?. The militarization of the drug war in many ways on the side of law enforcement has corresponded with the militarization of tactics and personnel on the criminal side," said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

The situation, Shirk added, "has heightened the competition and raised the stakes in a way that has led to extreme violence, at a level we have not seen before in Mexico."

In Nuevo Laredo, on the Texas border, a raging turf war between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels has killed more than 230 people in the last 18 months.

The defection of an anti-drug commando unit, the Zetas, from the Mexican military to the Gulf cartel in the late 1990s paved the way for military-style assaults, experts say.

Federal officials say they killed or captured the original group, but they believe jailed Gulf cartel leader Osiel Card##as still has at least 120 cadres trained by the Zetas at his command as recently as last August, and increasingly is using them to battle the rival cartel led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

But the violence is not limited to cities along the U.S.-Mexico border. In Apatzingan, in the central state of Michoacan, four men were killed and a police officer and four bystanders wounded in an Aug. 18 shootout between rival drug gangs that involved dozens of paramilitary gunmen in 10 vehicles.

Two weeks earlier, police in nearby Uruapan, also in Michoacan, had arrested a group of 10 suspected drug gang members armed with AK-47s and AR-15s.

Cartels also are using increasingly brutal methods to intimidate their enemies. The Rosarito Beach beheadings followed the decapitation in April of a police commander in Acapulco, whose head was found in a public plaza.

Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the top organized crime prosecutor in the Mexican attorney general's office, has taken over the investigation of the Baja California beheadings. In an interview for today's editions of the Mexico City newspaper El Universal, Santiago said the abductions and beheadings were characteristic of the brutal Central American-based Mara Salvatrucha gang, which has become increasingly involved in the Mexican drug trade.

"Acts like the ones we have just seen are manifestations of groups related to the Maras," he said. "We have seen the phenomenon of decapitation in El Salvador, a brutal act of intimidation that is occurring here as drug gangs are worn down and resort to recruiting this kind of group."

Jeffrey McIllwain, a criminal justice professor at San Diego State University who studies border security issues, believes the violence is a sign that pressure from law enforcement is affecting the cartels' bottom line.

"The fact is that it has hurt operations, severely in some cases ? so it makes sense that the cartels would step up their game," McIllwain said.

In Baja California, the crime wave could signal an escalation of the fierce war to control the lucrative Tijuana smuggling corridor, which traditionally has been controlled by the Arellano-Felix cartel. Several top-ranking members of the cartel have been killed or arrested in recent years, and other cartels may be sensing weakness, experts say.

Some recent attacks were shocking for their audacity, experts say. Last month, three men armed with AK-47s stormed into the Mexican federal attorney general's office in Tijuana and shot two agents, killing one. In December, assailants attacked the Tijuana home of a state police commander, killing two of his bodyguards. In October, Tijuana's chief of homicides narrowly escaped an attack by assailants who fired more than 50 bullets at his car.

"It's a more aggressive form of violence, with new ingredients," said Victor Clark, a border expert and director of Tijuana's Binational Center for Human Rights.
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[*] posted on 6-24-2006 at 12:56 PM
Memorial services held for three slain officers


http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/20060624-9999-1m24...

By Anna Cearley
June 24, 2006

ROSARITO BEACH ? The sounds of police sirens wailed through this seaside community yesterday as officers escorted the caskets of three officers to and from memorial services at a church, City Hall and the police station.

The officers, who were found beheaded this week, were hailed by the city's mayor, Antonio Macias Garay, for ?giving their lives to guarantee the security and peace of our citizens.?

Many questions remain about who was behind the ambush and abduction of the officers, and about the death of a civilian who was with the officers at the time of their disappearance Tuesday.

U.S. authorities, reviewing the man's criminal records, found that Rodolfo Aguilar Masforroll, 31, a Mexican citizen, had a string of arrests for mostly minor violations, including a recent one for firearm possession. However, information on whether he was charged or convicted wasn't immediately available.

It's unclear whether Aguilar was killed simply because he was with the police officers at the time of their abduction. The slayings are the most gruesome in recent years and have prompted speculation that they are the result of competition among drug cartels that create their power base by aligning with certain police.

However, few local officials will talk about the case publicly because of the high stakes. The city's director of public security referred inquiries to federal authorities.

In Mexico City, the nation's top organized-crime investigator, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, told Mexican media that the horrific style of killings appeared to be the work of Mara Salvatruchas, a gang with ties to El Salvador that is said to be providing services to a drug ring in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.

Rosarito Beach's director of public security, Valente Montijo Pompa, downplayed the suggestion that Mara Salvatruchas was involved.

?I would like for him to tell me why he says this,? Montijo said, though he acknowledged that the killings were committed by an organized-crime group.

Montijo said his department, which conducts patrols and refers investigations to other police agencies, isn't empowered to do more than respond to crime reports.

?This is organized crime, and they are groups more powerful . . . than we can deal with, and it's time that someone of a higher level takes the obligation of dealing with this,? he said.

The three officers and the civilian were abducted Tuesday when they went to investigate a report of a possible kidnapping in a remote part of the city, according to a police report. They found themselves surrounded by about 40 cars and 70 people. Their bodies were found in Rosarito Beach the next day, and their heads were discovered in Tijuana.

The Tijuana weekly Zeta, which reports extensively on drug crimes, published a story in yesterday's edition that Aguilar allegedly had been selling firearms to the Rosarito Beach Police Department. Montijo said the report, based on unnamed sources, wasn't true.

U.S. authorities had previously deported Aguilar. Mexican authorities initially identified him under another name and said he had met Montijo and one of the slain officers in Phoenix, and had come to the area to visit them.

Montijo said Aguilar was a construction worker.

Yesterday's services started at a local church, where a priest told the crowd that death is not the end for those who believe in the path of God.

The caskets holding the bodies of Ismael Arellano Torres, 36; Jes?s Hern?ndez Ballesteros, 42; and Benjam?n Fabi?n Ventura, 35, were followed by weeping family members. One of the officers was to be buried locally, but the others were to be flown to their home states.
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[*] posted on 6-24-2006 at 12:57 PM
Beheading in Rosarito may be linked to Mexico's Elections


http://publicbroadcasting.net/kpbs/news.newsmain?action=arti...

By Amy Isackson
KPBS SAN DIEGO (2006-06-23)

The beheading of three Rosarito policeman and one civilian earlier this week could be an act of election time cleansing by drug cartels, according to one San Diego academic who has sources close to the action. KPBS Reporter Amy Isackson has details.

The men were abducted by a heavily armed convoy. The next day, their bodies were found in a vacant lot in Rosarito. Their heads were discovered miles north in Tijuana.

Many say the murders are the latest battle in the drug cartels' war to control key drug smuggling routes.

Jeffery Mc Illwain who studies border security at San Diego State University suspects the violence could also be tied to Mexico's July second elections.

Mc Illwain: "Because there's no civil service protection like we have here in the Unite States, many people that are prosecutors, judges police officials will all lose their jobs or they might have other people who will come in and replace them. As a result of that the cartels that have influence with the incoming regimes or the outgoing regimes may find it necessary to clean house for the individuals they've been working with."

The assault was one of the largest in Baja California history. Amy Isackson, KPBS news.
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[*] posted on 6-24-2006 at 01:04 PM
Massacre Still Casts Its Shadow in Mexico


Quote:
Originally posted by BajaNews
http://publicbroadcasting.net/kpbs/news.newsmain?action=arti...

...The assault was one of the largest in Baja California history.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&am...

'98 Killings Revisited as Violence Grows

By Kevin Sullivan
February 1, 2004

ENSENADA, Mexico -- Viviana woke at 4 a.m. to the sound of a struggle outside her room.

"Don't move or I'll kill you!" she remembers a man yelling that morning in 1998, and she realized that the intruders had already seized her parents and her 4-year-old brother.

"Is there anyone else in the house?" a man shouted. She heard her mother say no.

Viviana, recalling that night recently, said she hid behind a dresser. She was 15, seven months pregnant and terrified. One of the men walked into her room. She said she prayed over and over, "Please God don't let him see me." Then he left.

Minutes later she heard long sprays of gunfire. The killers, hit men out to settle a score with her father involving drugs, according to the police, had pulled 19 members of her extended family out of their beds, lined them up against a wall and executed them.

The killing on the family's ranch here, 60 miles south of the U.S. border in Baja California, set a new benchmark for brutality and remains one of the country's most notorious drug-related massacres. The dead included Viviana's father, mother and younger brother, six other children and a woman who was eight months pregnant.

"Every time I close my eyes I see it all over again," said Viviana, now 20, discussing her experience publicly for the first time.

The Sept. 17, 1998, Ensenada massacre, with its unprecedented slaughter of women and children, is back on the minds of many people here because of a new wave of brutality by drug traffickers.

The violence, which has increased sharply since the 1980s, has reached new peaks recently. Scores of people have been killed along the U.S-Mexico border and up and down this country's well-worn smuggling corridors. Pressured by a new law enforcement offensive, warring gangs have been killing at a frenzied pace.

Analysts said nearly 100 people were killed in January. More than half of them were in Sinaloa state, which faces Baja across the Gulf of California and is often called the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. The region has averaged two murders a day since Jan. 1.

"They are killing like never before. It is now a little Colombia," Jesus Blancornelas, editor of the Zeta newspaper in nearby Tijuana, wrote Tuesday after 11 corpses were found buried in a yard in Ciudad Juarez, on the border with El Paso.

Since President Vicente Fox took office three years ago, government officials said they have made more than 24,000 drug-related arrests, including the powerful drug lords Osiel Card##as Guillen and Benjamin Arellano Felix. Officials say the recent surge of bloodshed is a mark of success, as decapitated cartels are fighting desperately to reposition themselves.

But critics said the crackdown has not slowed the flow of drugs. "It has only created tremendous violence," said Mariclaire Acosta, Fox's former top adviser on human rights.

Beyond the killing and the cascade of sensational headlines is a cost that human rights advocates say is largely forgotten. They say thousands of families -- of drug dealers, police, soldiers, prosecutors, witnesses and innocents caught in the crossfire -- have been destroyed. Years of killing have produced many survivors such as Viviana, whose lives have been changed forever by violence they did nothing to cause.

"They are the invisible victims of a war," said Victor Clark Alfaro, a human rights activist in Tijuana.

Earlier this month in Tijuana, Rogelio Delgado Neri, 43, a former state prosecutor, was gunned down by cartel assassins in a popular restaurant. The slaying dominated the news for a week. Clark said there was almost no mention that Delgado, his close friend, left behind an 8-year-old daughter and a pregnant wife. He said it was impossible to calculate the long-term damage to them: the psychological scars, the loss of their only source of income, the hard job of making a new life.

"The victims are never part of the story," Clark said.

Five years after the Ensenada massacre, the struggle continues for those who survived and for the 10,000 residents of El Sauzal, the little seaside suburb of Ensenada where the killings occurred.

"You can never leave it behind. It is a pain that never heals," said Linda Ramirez Bela, 64, Viviana's grandmother, a sad-eyed woman who wept softly as she described how she lost two sons and 17 other relatives in those few violent minutes.

Only Viviana and her 11-year-old cousin, Mario, survived the massacre. When the killers opened fire, Mario was shot twice but survived by pretending to be dead.

Mario, now 17, left school after the seventh grade, Viviana said. He has rarely been able to talk about what happened. She said Mario spends most of his time in a village where there is no television, no telephone service and little contact with the world. There, amid vast expanses of cactus and scrub brush, he passes his days tending cattle and horses.

Viviana, a young mother studying law at a university, was able to discuss the massacre at length without obvious emotion. A pretty woman with a gentle, round face, she said she is still too shaken by the experience to have her full name published.

The ranch, known as El Rodeo, sits abandoned except for a caretaker and her family, who live in one of the three main houses. Their front door is studded with bullet holes; the lock, blasted open by a large-caliber bullet, has been left shattered.

Weathered pieces of yellow police tape are stuck to the wall where the shooting happened, and to the garage doors in one of the houses. The concrete patio is chipped and gouged where bullets struck. The main gate is chained and locked.

"People are still worried," said Ana Maria Tovar, another family member. "There are still so many drug dealers out there. It continues and continues."

El Rodeo ranch was owned by Viviana's father, who police said was a small-time marijuana smuggler. They said he was one of many low-level smugglers working in territory controlled by the powerful and violent drug cartel run by brothers Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix.

Viviana said she does not believe her father was involved in drugs. She said she doesn't know why her family was targeted. But she said it was possible it was only a robbery that got out of hand.

Authorities said they were sure the massacre was drug-related. A top law enforcement official involved in the case said the 15 or so killers were from a gang that worked with the Arellano Felixes.

Ensenada police officer Jorge Argoud, one of the first to arrive at the ranch, said he has never been the same since he peered over the wall and saw the bodies.

"When you see a dead person in a car accident, it's one thing," Argoud said. "But when you see so many dead people -- a pregnant woman, a baby -- you don't know how to handle it."

A spokeswoman for the federal attorney general's office said at least 10 men were arrested in connection with the killings but declined to provide details about the outcome of their cases. She said the alleged leader of the killers, Lino Portillo Cabanillas, hanged himself in prison a year ago.

Viviana said she hopes the killers are punished, but she doesn't dwell on their fate. She tries to concentrate instead on her baby, born two months after the massacre, and on her studies. She wants to practice criminal law, an interest she said was piqued by being a victim of crime.

Asked how often she still thinks about what happened, she answered immediately, with a cool, level gaze.

"Always," she said. "All the time."
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[*] posted on 6-24-2006 at 01:11 PM
Baja California Village Remembers Massacre by Drug Kingpins


http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,47884,00.html

March 14, 2002

EL SAUZAL, Mexico ? As the fog drifted in, the slap of wet cement and the clunk of stones filtered from the seaside cemetery where workmen repaired a gap in the old stone wall.

Three years had passed since the wall was knocked down so a bulldozer could enter to dig a plot big enough for all the bodies. Seven were buried together that day ? 19 people were killed in all ? in what officials say was a gruesome message from the Arellano Felix brothers.

The surviving villagers were so stunned that they put off repairs at the cemetery. "It just broke our hearts to go up there," said Ana Maria Tovar, who lost nine relatives. "It hurt too much. Nobody wanted to go."

Now a tranquil fishing village, El Sauzal is believed to have suffered the wrath of Mexico's most violent drug gang under Ramon Arellano Felix. Allegedly the top enforcer of what is sometimes known as the Tijuana Cartel, Ramon Arellano Felix raised the savagery of Mexico's drug violence to another level, using unmeasured violence to ensure the dominance of his family's business.

Mexican and U.S. officials believe they have finally broken the organization.

Mexican prosecutors said Wednesday that DNA testing confirmed a man killed Feb. 10 in a shootout with Mexican police in the Pacific coast city of Mazatlan was Ramon Arellano Felix, one of the FBI's 10 most-wanted fugitives. His brother Benjamin, considered the overall leader of the gang, was arrested Saturday.

A 1999 Drug Enforcement Administration report said about 300 murders in Mexico and the United States had been attributed to the Arellano Felix gang. The massacre in El Sauzal, 60 miles south of the U.S. border near Ensenada, was considered the gang's most savage display of violence before the cartel quieted because it was drawing too much attention.

On Sept. 17, 1998, gunmen raided El Sauzal, rousting men, women and children from their sleep after a festive night of Independence Day celebrations. Some wearing T-shirts and shorts, others in pajamas, nine children and 11 adults ? including a pregnant woman ? were packed tightly along a wall and riddled with bullets.

A 15-year-old girl hidden nearby listened to the shooting, waiting for the killers to come for her next. She and a 12-year-old boy ? who played dead under the pile of bodies ? were the only survivors.

Among the dead was Fermin Castro, a man described by officials as a minor-league drug smuggler who paid more powerful traffickers for the right to move air shipments of marijuana.

Gen. Guillermo Alvarez, who was in charge of anti-drug operations for Mexico's Federal Judicial Police at the time, said the four suspected gunmen arrested after the attack had connections to Ramon Arellano Felix, who allegedly controlled all significant movements of drugs through Baja California.

Alvarez and federal prosecutors said Castro was killed to stop his marijuana-smuggling operation from becoming too competitive.

"These people were vicious, cold-blooded killers, particularly Ramon and the people he surrounded himself with," said Dan Thornhill Jr., a DEA agent who followed the gang for nearly two decades. "They wouldn't think twice about killing children."

The Rev. Laurence Joy went to the sprawling ranch compound after the massacre, hoping to pray over the bodies. But soldiers refused to let him in before they were taken away. He said he will never forget the amount of blood covering the patio. The pool drying in the sun was an inch thick in some places.

"The idea that people were brought to the same spot and methodically killed, that type of cruelty was something I had no experience with. It was shocking to me," he said.

The caskets filled Joy's humble church.

"We had to be innovative with the cement blocks to position the caskets nicely in front of the altar. There were children and adults. It was too much," said the Irish Catholic priest, shaking his head and then continuing: "Too much sadness, too much grief, too much anger, too much frustration. It was a case of surviving the day."

Many of the victims' families are still surviving the pain day by day.

Ana Maria Tovar, who lives down the hill from the cemetery, buried nine of her family members, including her niece who was eight months pregnant. Tovar recently asked workers to build a small fence and plant a garden around the giant burial plot.

"I hope what comes around, goes around, but we are still left with the horror, the anger," she said. "I still can't watch the news about it. I still don't understand it."

Jose Torres, 72, said it's best not to try to sort out the reasons for the carnage. Torres lives next door to the compound but was off working in California when the massacre occurred. He saw the tragedy on the news and came home to find his two nieces among the dead.

"Only the killers know what really happened," he said. "But you don't mess with those things. What for? It won't bring them back."

[Edited on 6-24-2006 by BajaNews]
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[*] posted on 6-24-2006 at 01:13 PM
Mexican Crime Scene Paints Picture Of Killers Carrying Out Orders


http://www.laprensa-sandiego.org/archieve/september25/crime....

September 25, 1998
By Mark Stevenson

EL SAUZAL, Mexico - The killers arrived in three light trucks before dawn, dressed all in black and carrying automatic rifles.

They worked quickly, professionally. And when they were done, 18 men, women and children from one extended family lay dead in bleeding mounds beside a patio wall at the ranch by the sea in northern Mexico.

``The children said that it lasted an eternity - an hour,'' said state Cmdr. Felipe Perez Cruz, quoting testimony of a 12-year-old boy and 15-year-old girl who survived the Thursday morning massacre linked to drugs. ``It was probably 15 or 20 minutes.''

Statements by investigators and a tour of the bloodstained compound a day after the killings provide signs of a well-organized team carrying out orders to kill an alleged marijuana trafficker and his relatives for some unknown crime against rivals in the drug trade.

After driving across a dusty plain, at least nine or 10 gunmen got out at the ranch this suburb of the Baja California resort of Ensenada. The killers broke into three teams, each assigned to one of the family's three houses. ``They must have known the family,'' Perez Cruz said.

First hit was the Tovar family household, headed by a sister of alleged trafficker Fermin Castro - apparently the main target. The Tovar family was the only part of the Castro clan not believed to have been involved with drugs, investigators say.

One team went through a downstairs window in the Tovar house, in the middle of the compound. Micaria Jaime Tovar, eight months pregnant with her second child, her 1-year-old nephew Cesar and four other family members were taken to the patio, probably at gunpoint.

A second team entered the house of Francisco Flores Altamirano, Castro's brother-in-law and alleged lieutenant in marijuana smuggling. The last team went after Castro, who local media say was known as ``The Iceman.''

While the first and second teams gathered half-dressed couples and pajama-clad children in a corner of the patio in the early morning chill, the third team raced up an exterior staircase and battered or shot in a third-story doorway in Castro's house.

Castro was caught in his second-story bedroom, where he was beaten and possibly tortured. Two days later, Castro lay in a coma with gunshot wounds to the head, barely alive.

It was unclear whether he was taken to the patio, where the victims were closely packed together against a cinderblock wall. His wife and 2-year-old son were among those killed there.

Normally, the story would have stopped with the gunmen issuing a warning that would have been respected under a code of silence so strict that ``you can't get a word out of these people,'' federal investigator Jose Luis Chavez says.

Traffickers' relatives - and especially children - are rarely targeted in drug-related paybacks in Mexico.

But something was different this time.

Perez Cruz said the killers may have been in an ``altered state'' - drugged or emotionally upset. Or the killers may have been following little-used rules about punishment for those who switch sides in drug gangs, local media say.

Still closely huddled together, toddlers beside their mothers, they were ordered to get down on the cold concrete. Neighbors woke when bursts of automatic weapons fire shattered the early morning quiet at 4:15 a.m.

``There weren't finished off one by one. They simply sprayed them all with bullets,'' Perez Cruz said. Eighty spent shells, an average of four bullets per victim, were later found.

Mario Alberto Flores, 12, miraculously survived. Losing blood, he wandered about Castro's home until he was found by his cousin, Viviana Flores, 15, who was never discovered by the killers. The girl, six months pregnant, had hidden between a table and an armoire.

There were no signs of struggle in the houses or on the patio. Apparently no weapons were kept at the compound.

Inside Castro's house, a pile of video tapes lay on the living room floor, some clothes on the back of a couch. Washing hung limply on clotheslines outside.

Ten people have been detained in the border town of Tecate, east of Tijuana, for questioning after the discovery of guns similar to those used in the killings, authorities said Friday. But the detainees have not been formally arrested.

The crime scene offers no clues for the killers' motive. The killings remain as mysterious as the lone trail of bloody footprints leading away from Castro's house.

A bare, right foot imprinted in blood starts to flee, wavers and finally disappears just steps from the back door.
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