As if decapitation and ripping apart live victims weren’t bad enough, the horrid Knights Templar drug cartel also forced its members to eat human hearts, according to a government official.
The Michoacan state syndicate is arguably the country’s most horrific organized crime gang.
The region has been crippled for nearly two years by fighting between vigilantes and syndicate gunmen. Chaos in the agricultural state has worsened in past months as rivalries erupted between various factions of the self-defense groups.
Even by the murderous standards of Mexican cartels, the Knights Templar is particularly gruesome. Its members are known for cutting off the heads of those they consider enemies and sometimes boiling people alive.
Its former spiritual leader, Narzio Moreno, aka El Mas Loco (The Craziest One) was notorious for his love of knives and guns and was one of the world’s most-wanted cartel leaders. Mexican authorities twice reported killing him — once in 2010 and again in 2014. It was his decision to add cannibalism to his syndicate’s arsenal.
Making members eat a human heart as a test of loyalty was part of Moreno’s way of finding traitors.
“The ritual ranged from dismembering people they intended to kill to sometimes serving up the heart,” Alfredo Castillo, Michoacan’s federal security commissioner, said on local television this week. He did not elaborate on whether the practice is still in use.
His comments come as the country is facing one of its biggest cases of cartel corruption and lawlessness. President Enrique Pena Nieto is in the midst of the worst crisis to rock his government since he took office. A drug cartel in Guerrero state, working for a local mayor, abducted and assassinated 43 college students in September.
Massive protests continue across Mexico by demonstrators demanding justice for the slain students and for an end to pervasive corruption.
With News Wire Services
