Rescue workers help a man who was injured after a fragmentation grenade exploded next to an open air bar in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, early Thursday, Aug. 26, 2010.

At least 20 people were wounded, four of them seriously, when unidentified individuals tossed a bomb into a bar in Puerto Vallarta, a resort city on Mexico’s Pacific coast, police said Thursday.

The attack occurred around midnight Wednesday at the Pink Cheladas bar, where about 150 young people were partying, Puerto Vallarta police department spokesmen told Efe.

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/08/bomb-wounds-20-in-mexican-resort-city.html

The survivor of a massacre on a ranch 85 miles south of Brownsville trudged into a navy checkpoint — a bullet wound in his neck — with a tale almost too gruesome even for a country locked in the throes of a vicious and bloody drug war.

The 72 illegal immigrants killed in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, were on a bus bound for the United States when, between Saturday and Sunday, were intercepted by a convoy of Zetas. According to the testimony of the only survivor of what it is until now, the worst massacre in the wave of violence by organized crime in Mexico, several SUV’s blocked the path of the bus carrying the victims and forced them out at gun point. They warned them that they were Los Zetas.

One by one the 58 men and 14 women, including minors, were placed against the wall in a cellar of the ranch. Then they were forced to keep their heads down and were shot with bursts of high-powered weapons. After the barraged of gunfire directed at the victims subsided, the murderers then shot each individual person on the head at point blank, the coup de grace.

Among those that were executed, there was Luis Freddy, originally from Ecuador, who pretended to be dead. The final shot aimed at his head entered at one end of his neck and exited through the jaw. He waited there, spread out, until the perpetrators left and he managed to escape. “I only remember hearing the laments and the pleas of some of the people who were there. Then I heard shots, and when everything was over I stood up to get help,” he said.

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El jefe de jefes Marcos Arturo Beltran Leyva

The Beltrán-Leyva Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de los Beltrán Leyva) is a Mexican drug cartel and organized crime synidicate founded by the five Beltrán Leyva brothers: Marcos Arturo, Mario Alberto, Carlos, Alfredo and Héctor.

The cartel is responsible for cocaine transportation and wholesaling, marijuana production and wholesaling, and heroin production and wholesaling, controls numerous drug trafficking corridors, and engages in human smuggling, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, murder and gun-running.

The Beltrán Leyva brothers, who were formerly aligned with the Sinaloa Cartel, have been allies of Los Zetas for some time.

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/08/beltran-leyva-cartel.html

Mexican policemen and a soldier stand guard next to remains of a parked vehicle outside a studio of top broadcaster Televisa in Ciudad Victoria, the Mexican state of Tamaulipas August 27, 2010. A car bomb exploded outside the TV studio early on Friday, but there were no injuries, Mexican media and witnesses said.

Two bombs went off early Friday in the capital of the violence-wracked northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, where 72 U.S.-bound migrants were slaughtered by gunmen earlier this week.

Neither bombing caused any casualties.

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/08/bombs-go-off-in-mexican-cities.html

The horrifying massacre of 72 Central and South American immigrants by the hands of Zetas shocked the world. Preliminary investigations, based on testimony by the sole survivor of this attack, report the immigrants were first given the option of paying their ransoms in cash or as cartel slaves. Having no cash and refusing to join Zeta forces, the 58 men and 14 women, were blindfolded and bound before being executed on spot.

We know what happened to them, but what about the others? What happens to those who are unable to pay, but still desperately wish to survive?

Below you will read the story of Marisolina, a young immigrant from El Salvador who’s only dream, like many before her, was the American dream. An immigrant who, with no means to pay ransom, was forced into the dark world of Zeta slavery.

Marisolina didn’t have relatives in the United States, much less in El Salvador, who would or even could pay the Zetas, who kidnapped her, the $3000 dollars they demanded to release her.”You’re going have to come up with another way to pay us, Guerita”, they repeatedly threatened her in the first few days of her captivity.

http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/08/zeta-slaves-story-from-inside_28.html