Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Ringing In The New Year, Narco Style

The New Year arrived in Monterrey, Mexico, pretty much simultaneously with the first drug cartel-related killing of 2011. According to Blog del Narco:

This morning came the report of the first finding of an encobijado of 2011 in Nuevo Leon, the event occurring in Del Carmen in the municipality of Monterrey.

Following the report of a man dead in the parking lot of an office of accountants and lawyers, authorities arrived and learned that the caretaker of the place, named Jose Martinez, found the body.

The unknown man was barefoot and had been shot, approximately three days ago.


I had never seen the word "encobijado" before and had to look it up:

Encobijado, noun, a person found wrapped in blankets after being assassinated by drug traffickers or their associates.


That's a sad commentary on the situation south of the border. Narco killings are so numerous and so stylized that Mexicans coin new words to describe them.

2 comments:

Ando said...

Here is a quite different recent experience from the border - I wonder what the tone of the article would be if the writer had found an encobijado?

http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/sports_college_hurricanes/2010/12/an-afternoon-in-juarez.html

TSB said...

I used to walk around in Juarez and other Mexican cities with no real concern about violence, but that was back 10-20 years ago. Now, a day trip across the border is considered adventure tourism. Sad.