Heads Found In Cooler (Los Cabos)

  

Cabo San Lucas beheadings: Cartel killings traumatize resort town as heads found in cooler

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Authorities in Mexico's Baja California Sur state say two heads have been found in a cooler just two blocks from the tourist zone of Cabo San Lucas.

One day earlier, the state prosecutor's office announced that two dismembered bodies were found in another cooler in the tourist corridor.

On Sunday, state prosecutors also said the total bodies found after several days of excavation of clandestine graves had reached 18. The bodies of five women and 13 men were found in 12 graves near the Cabo Pulmo nature reserve. They were discovered off a road that runs between the reserve and the resort of San Jose del Cabo.

When is it that you know “it’s over?”  I know this area, Los Cabos, so well.  We used to vacation there regularly, as frequently as possible.  Once we discovered it, there was nowhere else we wanted to go. Its reputation then was as an utterly quiet, peaceful, complete retreat from the beaten path of work, career, etc.  Back then, before cell phones were ubiquitous, even the high-pressure businesses we worked in accepted it if once a year you disappeared from radar for a little while and were satisfied if you placed one of two brief (and quite expensive, hard-to-make) calls from the road.  After we were kidnapped in Mexico City, we decided to continue on to Twin Dolphin in Cabo San Lucas because Cabo was the place where Mexicans themselves went to escape the difficulties and depredations of their increasingly endangered lives on the mainland.  No more it seems.  I think of my friends back in Cabo whom I haven’t seen since Twin Dolphin disappeared to make way for a new mega-resort that never got built post-2008 and am very sad and sorry for them.  I cannot tell you how great it was there.  Sea, sky, and mountains all together. Tilting planes, perfect weather. 

RUBBER TRUNCHEON (TEAR THE ROOF OFF)

Five men stood in a semicircle in the centre of the laboratory.  I recognized Groom and Nikolai, with his arm still in a sling, amongst them; but it was the man in the centre of them who held my gaze.  Lashed to the chair in which he sat, he appeared to be a mechanic for he was wearing brown dungarees.  His head was lolling on his chest and he looked as if he were unconscious.  This, I guessed, was the one who had screamed.  I was soon to know why.  One of the group advanced threateningly towards the seated figure weighing what looked like a short stick in his hand.  Then I saw the stick whip as the man brandished it and realised that it was a rubber truncheon, the totschläger or “beater-to-death” of Nazi Germany and the persuasive element in many a Third Degree.  The man with the truncheon made a show of hitting the mechanic across the knee with it.  The man’s head rolled back and he let out a hoarse shout of terror.   I understood.  A blow on the knee-cap is bad enough at the best of times.  When that blow is dealt with a rubber truncheon the pain is unbearable.  Moreover, the knee-cap does not numb as easily as other parts of the body, so that the repetitions of the blow will intensify the agony.  The device, a New York detective has told me, is far more demoralising to the victim than many of the more elaborate tortures.

Note:  I’m happy to report that I have never been hit with a rubber truncheon. One came close once when I was caught in a riot outside the Parliament-Funkadelic concert at Madison Square Garden and the guy standing next to me got hit. The cops merely lifted me off the ground and threw me through what had previously been a glass door before the rioters shattered the glass.  I have been assaulted with a blackjack, however.  Two terrible blows which left me with cartoonish-comical, painful bumps on the top of my head.  That was when we were kidnapped in Mexico City.

Text:  Eric Ambler, The Dark Frontier (1936)

ACravan: Being Kidnapped  (Link)

ACravan: Being Kidnapped 2 (Link)

Parliament: Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker) (Link)