Mexican Drug Cartels Reportedly Force New Members to Eat Hearts of Victims

Vigilantes in the Michoacan state have been battling vicious drug gangs that forced some of their members to eat their victims' hearts. Photo: Reuters

[From article]
A vicious Mexican drug gang forced some members to eat the hearts of murder victims as part of a gruesome initiation rite to root out infiltrators, a government security official said Tuesday, citing witness testimony.
For much of the past year, Michoacan, a mountainous, agricultural state in western Mexico, has been ravaged by fighting between drug gang henchmen and vigilantes who took up arms against the cartels but have since splintered into violent factions.
[. . .]
The renewed fighting in Michoacan comes as President Enrique Pena Nieto faces his deepest crisis since taking office, following the apparent murder of 43 trainee teachers by a drug gang working with corrupt police in neighboring Guerrero state.
[. . .]
The main gangs operating in Michoacan, La Familia Michoacana, and later offshoot the Knights Templar cartel, were founded by Nazario Moreno, or “The Craziest One,” a cultish crime boss who was finally killed in March 2014 after the previous government declared him dead in 2010.
[. . .]
Interviewed on local television, Alfredo Castillo, Michoacan’s federal security commissioner, denied cannibalism was widespread, but said there were various testimonies indicating heart-eating was part of a macabre initiation Moreno used to root out moles or test his men’s loyalty.
“The ritual ranged from dismembering people they intended to kill to sometimes serving up the heart,” Castillo said.
[. . .]
More than 100,000 people have been killed in gang-related violence in Mexico since 2007.

http://nypost.com/2015/01/06/mexican-drug-gang-eats-hearts-of-their-murder-victims/

Mexican drug gang eats hearts of their murder victims
By Reuters
New York Post
January 6, 2015 | 1:07pm