Don’t know who else in Michoacan, other than the infamous ultra-right-wing Christianist decapitation drug cartel who own and terrorize the state, would have the firepower and wherewithal to pull off this sort of mass-murder of federal policeman.

They’ve done it before. When La Familia’s top assassin got arrested by the cops in July of last year, they killed 5 federal law enforcement officials within a couple of hours.

Ambush in Central Mexico Leaves 10 Federal Police Officers Dead
Latin American Herald Tribune

MEXICO CITY – Ten Federal Police officers and several criminals died in an ambush Monday on a police unit near Zitacuaro, a city in Mexico’s Michoacan state, officials said.

The officers, who are providing security in several cities in Michoacan, were attacked as they traveled from Ciudad Hidalgo, a city in Michoacan, to the Federal District, the Public Safety Secretariat said.

The ambush occurred in downtown Zitacuaro, located 168 kilometers (104 miles) west of Mexico City, near a place called Lengua de Vaca.

The officers took fire near the National Technical Professional Education School, or Conalep, in Zitacuaro.

“Ten Federal Police officers lost their lives and several others were wounded while repelling the attack,” the secretariat said . .

“Several assailants lost their lives and others were wounded” in the shootout, the secretariat said, adding that “the bodies and wounded from the armed group were pulled out of the area by their accomplices.”

Federal Police officers are searching for the gunmen by air and land.

Army troops, Federal Police reinforcements, state police and emergency services personnel went to the scene of the ambush to help the wounded officers, Michoacan Public Safety Secretary Minerva Bautista told Formato 21 radio.

Investigators have not determined who carried out the attack and it is not known if any arrests have been made, Bautista said.

Michoacan is a stronghold of La Familia Michoacana, a drug cartel infamous for decapitating and dismembering enemies, as well as for mounting attacks on the security forces.

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The hyper-murderous Christian lunatic beheading drug cartel, La Familia Michoacana, continue to spread violence and influence outside of their home state.

Their trademark headless victims are now being found on the streets of vacation mecca Acapulco, in the state of Guerrero:

Bloodshed blights Acapulco resort
Page last updated at 01:03 GMT, Sunday, 14 March 2010

Thirteen people have been killed in an outbreak of drug-related violence in the southern Mexican beach resort of Acapulco, officials have said.

Five of the dead were police officers whose patrol was machine gunned.

Eight other bullet-riddled bodies were discovered in different areas around the city – four had been beheaded . .

The Pacific states of Guerrero and neighbouring Michoacan are largely under the control of the powerful “La Familia” cartel . .

The latest bloodshed could not have come at a worse time: it is a holiday weekend in Mexico and the start of the spring break, which brings a surge of American visitors.

At least two of the decapitated victims were dumped close to the centre of Acapulco, on a highway popular with tourists for its scenic views.

The BBC’s Julian Miglierini, in Mexico City, says the country’s drugs war has cast a long shadow on the world-famous sunny beaches of the city known as Mexico’s Pacific Jewel.

Although many Mexicans and foreigners continue to choose Acapulco as a holiday destination, Saturday’s events seem to confirm that its reputation as an idyllic destination is long gone, he adds.

La Familia last week:

Hitmen behead drug rivals
Published: 8:41AM Saturday October 17, 2009
Source: Reuters

Authorities in Mexico say drug hitmen have beheaded 10 rivals, chopped up their bodies and left them in plastic bags on an isolated road in western Mexico in the latest gruesome attack in a raging drug war.

The body parts filled 18 bags and were dumped in a delivery truck abandoned on a back road in the Pacific state of Guerrero along with a message from the La Familia (The Family) cartel that is fighting for smuggling routes in the area.

“La Familia doesn’t kill innocent people. Those who die deserve to die,” read a hand-scrawled message left on top of the bags.

Breaking yesterday:

La Familia Michoacana’s Increasing Woes
October 22, 2009 | 2331 GMT

The heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the FBI announced the results of Project Coronado, a 44-monthlong multiagency operation against the Mexican drug trafficking organization La Familia Michoacana (LFM), the morning of Oct. 22. According to the officials, 1,186 individuals across 19 states were arrested and $33 million, 1,999 kilograms of cocaine, 2,730 pounds of methamphetamine, 29 pounds of heroin, 16,390 pounds of marijuana, 389 weapons, 269 vehicles and two synthetic drug laboratories were seized over the course of the operation.

LFM is one of the most violent and ambitious criminal organizations in Mexico, but also one of the smallest. This kind of operation is thus sure to have a serious impact on LFM’s operations both at home and abroad, especially as Mexican authorities have been stepping up operations against the group in its home state of Michoacan.

LFM was formed more than 20 years ago as a vigilante group aimed at kidnappers, drug traffickers and other criminals operating in the southern Mexican state of Michoacan. As the years passed, LFM itself became involved in the drug trade, particularly in methamphetamine trafficking. The group later formed an alliance with the Gulf cartel and came under the control of Los Zetas. LFM, as it is currently known, formed in 2006 after several of the groups’ leaders split from Los Zetas. Since then, LFM has developed a reputation as one of the most strange and violent drug-trafficking organizations in Mexico due to the purportedly Christian-based teachings of its ideological leader, known as El Mas Loco, who advocates the torture and murder of LFM opponents as a representation of divine justice. LFM’s reputation has won it the title of the most dangerous criminal organization in Mexico according to former Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora. in Mexico

The nastiest, most murderous, decapititating fundamentalist Christians on the planet. Tough-guy James Eldredge should be proud.

Mexican police, soliders killed in multi-city attacks by drug gangs

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CNN) — Coordinated attacks in at least seven Mexican cities killed three federal police officers and two soldiers Saturday in what officials are calling an unprecedented onslaught by drug gangs.

Michoacan is in west-central Mexico, on the Pacific coast.

The government, the brave officials, federales and policemen of Mexico, the ones who are standing up to the drug cartels, are unbelievably courageous. They should get a hell of a lot more cheers from us than they do, especially when you consider that it’s Americans’ cash that these para-militaries have used to out-arm and out-gun everybody.

Saturday’s attacks came just days after a drug gang in Tijuana declared they were at war with police, threatening to kill five officers every week until Police Chief Julian Leyzaola resigns.

Tijuana, the westernmost city in Mexico, is across the border from San Diego, California. Sixteen police officers have died there in 2009, and officers are now patrolling the city in groups of six, KUSI reported.

Leyzaola is the man, he’s serious.

You know that corruption has been a way of life there when the cartels make political demands about his employment. ‘We want somebody we can bribe.’

Surprised? Shocked, but not surprised.

NarcoGuerra Times–Cartels as Parallel State?

After two-years of war on the drug cartels–including the military occupation of Ciudad Juarez,– Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s mano dura campaign has little to show for all the blood and money spilled.

Last weekend an on-the-ground report from Michoacan came in that threw a sobering splash of cold water on Calderon’s claims of success in his narcoguerra. Fourteen Michoacan journalists interviewed for this report concurred that the cartel, La Familia Michoacana controlled at least 85% of the state. Some said the narcos had full reign. The cartels have agreements with local, state and federal authorities to conduct business–growing marijuana or poppies, transporting and wholesaling the commodities, running prostitution and extortion rackets or whatever other cash-generating enterprise they come up with…

But there’s another development that takes these new narcos to another, more interesting level where they are functioning behind populist ideology and in the case of La Familia, with Bible-based overtones. They refer to their assassinations and beheadings as “divine justice”.

La Familia: Another Deadly Mexican Syndicate

The death toll related to narco-trafficking in Mexico more than doubled last year, from 2,275 in 2007 to 5,207 in 2008. An increasingly important contributor to this ghastly mayhem is the shadowy Michoacana family, or La Familia. Its center of operations is the Pacific Coast state of Michoacan, home to trafficking routes and sophisticated factories for producing methamphetamine, as well as the port Lázaro Cárdenas, an open sesame for drug imports.

They left behind a message, written on cardboard: “The family doesn’t kill for money. It doesn’t kill women. It doesn’t kill innocent people, only those who deserve to die. Know that this is divine justice.”

From Focus On The Family to La Familia Michoacana

La Familia Michoacana was all over the news out of Mexico last week. In President Calderon’s home state of Michoacan, federales carted off ten mayors and twenty other local officials who were allegedly under the control of La Familia, an ambitious cartel often described as a “pseudo-evangelical cult.”

On Saturday an internal intelligence report on La Familia from the Mexican justice department surfaced in Milenio, bringing the news that the faith-based cartel grounds its indoctrination program on the writings of macho Christian author and veteran Focus On The Family senior fellow John Eldredge, who now heads Ransomed Hearts Ministries in Colorado Springs.

There are four separate references to Eldredge in the Mexican intelligence memo on La Familia. The cartel has conducted a three-year recruitment and PR campaign across Michoacan featuring thousands of billboards and banderas carrying their evangelical message and warnings. La Familia is known for tagging its executions and other mayhem as “la divina justica”–divine justice.

The report says La Familia leader, Nazario Gonzalez Moreno aka El Loco o More Chayo (”The Craziest”) has made Eldredge’s books salvaje de corazon required reading for La Familia and has paid rural teachers and National Development Education members to circulate the Colorado-based evangelical’s writings throughout the Michoacan countryside.

Braveheart vs. Mister Rogers:
John Eldredge’s Walk on the Wild Side

With this in mind, take a look at Wild at Heart. The basic contention is that God created man with a wild heart, and God did this because God Himself is wild at heart. An idea central to Eldredge’s message (and quoted from the inside dust jacket of the book) is that every man must have “a battle to fight, a beauty to rescue and an adventure to live. That is how he bears the image of God.” Eldredge holds up Braveheart hero William Wallace as an example of a real man, in contrast to the late Mister Rogers, the soft-spoken children’s TV personality, as a weak, modem Christian man.

“Eldredge quotes from Isaiah 63, which describes God wearing blood-stained clothes, spattered as though he had been treading a wine press. Then he writes: ‘Talk about Braveheart. This is one fierce, wild, and passionate guy. I have never heard Mister Rogers talk like that. Come to think of it, I never heard anyone in church talk like that, either. But this is the God of heaven and earth.”"

On August 18, 2006, the organization decapitated Jesús Rodríguez Valencia, a member of the Milenio Cartel, placing the following message next to his cadaver: “All that rises falls of its own weight, it would be like this, the family greets you.” Three months later, the police discovered two bodies on the Zamora-La Barca highway, next to which was a note that said: “For those who sell ice. This is divine justice. Sincerely, La Familia.” “Divine justice. No to the meth makers, La Familia,” was the text discovered alongside a body found on the Jacona-Los Reyes highway. The message appeared on a green card, reflecting the color that La Familia uses on its emblems, placards, and communications.

In all, authorities attributed 17 decapitations to La Familia in 2006 alone. Between the murder of Rodriguez Valencia that August and December 31, 2008, La Familia killed scores, if not hundreds, of people. There were 233 executions in Michoacan, most of whose victims belonged to one criminal band or another.