Mexican ex-police commander beheaded

MEXICO CITY – The drug war in the southern Mexican states of Guerrero and Michoacan took a gruesome turn Thursday with the discovery of the decapitated head of a police commander who had resigned his post just days earlier in the face of death threats.

“So that you learn to respect,” read a message scrawled on a red sheet attached to a Guerrero state government building in Acapulco, where passers-by in the early morning hours discovered the heads of former Police Commander Mario Nunez Magana, 35, of the Municipal Preventive Police, and another man, who was not immediately identified.

Acapulco officials would not confirm news reports that identified the second victim as a police officer.

More than 140 people, including many police officers and commanders, have been killed in the western states of Guerrero and Michoacan this year as the so-called Sinaloa and Gulf cartels struggle for control of methamphetamine production, street drug sales, cocaine shipping points and other elements of a lucrative trade in illicit drugs.

The heads were discovered about 3 a.m. in a plaza fronted by a church and the state Finance and Administration headquarters, the same location where Nunez led a police unit during a January battle with gunmen believed to be from both of the rival cartels.

Four suspected “narcos” were shot and killed in the January incident.

Nunez had been receiving death threats ever since, officials said.

After two months of hesitation, Nunez resigned his post over the weekend.

On Wednesday afternoon, armed men kidnapped Nunez as he and his father traveled in a pickup near his home. “The kidnappers told his father not to get involved, that the problem wasn’t with him,” Valdez said.

After the discovery of the heads, which were inside separate plastic trash bags, police found the victims’ bodies at about 8 a.m. a few hundred yards away in the parking lot of an Acapulco school.

Both bodies showed signs of being beaten.