Mexico Trucker Online

Three headless bodies were found in the Valley of Juárez on Sunday and Monday while worries grew over a new Internet message demanding that prominent Juárez families and business leaders pay a “quota” to a drug cartel for protection.

The validity of the message was unknown. It was posted last week supposedly by “La Linea,” as the Juárez drug cartel is also known, on the popular video-sharing site YouTube.com, and shows scrolling text in Spanish set to a narco-corrido (folk song).

“You saw what happened to Wily Moya,” stated the message referring to the fatal shooting of a prominent nightclub owner May 18 as he left a bar he owned.

The video, posted on May 27, claims that entrepreneurs will pay protection or they will be kidnapped. ” … With us, you do not play (or) you’ll be found without a head. From La Linea,” the video read.

If the menace is true, it would mirror a “war tax” extorted from businesses leaders in Nuevo Laredo by the drug cartels to finance their war in recent years for that border city.

The YouTube message was the latest in a trend of threats left with bodies, threats against police and threats posted online allegedly by warring drug trafficking groups in Juárez associated with reputed Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera or La Linea.

On Sunday, an unidentified man was found in two plastic bags in the sand dunes near the community of El Sauzal. The body was in one bag, a severed head in the other, state investigators said.

Early Monday, the bodies of two unidentified men were found wrapped in blankets with their heads cut off also in El Sauzal. One head was in a black plastic bag. The second head was found three blocks away.

There were signs on two of the bodies stating, “This message is for those who keep believing and for those who don’t believe. Keep listening to El Chapo Guzman who only guarantees you death. … La Linea.”

The violence in Juárez, which has topped 400 homicides this year and has turned increasingly gruesome, was mentioned by Mexico President Felipe Calderón in a speech Sunday in recognition of the anniversary of the Mexican navy .

Calderón said his administration’s war against organized crime was just beginning and would intensify in Juárez and Culiacán, home of the Sinaloa cartel, in order to achieve the drop in crime seen in Acapulco and the states of Tamualipas and Michoacan.

“Criminal operations in the last decade have developed and diversified,” said Calderón in a transcript. “Who controls a plaza (a cartel’s territory) not only seeks trafficking but to generate a domestic consumer market that is destroying our children and with them our future.”

In other developments

• Mexican special forces soldiers seized a cache of firearms, more than a kilo of heroin and two bulletproof Jeep Grand Cherokees during a raid last week targeting a suspected cell of hit men in Juárez, federal officials said.

• Seven men were arrested during the 3 a.m. raid May 28 at a building used as a drug warehouse in the 6500 block of Donato Guerra. Soldiers with the 11th Special Forces Battalion seized a total of seven vehicles and 17 weapons, including five AK-47s and three AR-15 rifles.