Cancún -- Two young women who allegedly peddled drugs on the Isla de Mujeres tourist strip were found executed in a room of the Hotel San Jorge yesterday (October 20). The women, 26 and 23, were seized by unknown persons on Tuesday. One of them had just been released from jail the day before, after being found guilty of possession of 150 grams of cocaine. She was fined 150,000 pesos ($11,500 USD), according to court officials. Authorities say they were known to be local drug retailers.
The bodies were discovered by hotel workers. Both women had been bound hand and foot, gagged and then decapitated. Police said the murders are plainly an "adjustment of accounts" by organized crime. Isla de Mujeres is home to only about 12,000 permanent residents, and authorities say this is the first case of narco violence directly on the island.
Security in Quintana Roo state, on Mexico's famed Riviera Maya, has become increasingly compromised in recent weeks. Police say the Los Zetas drug cartel controls crime in the area.
Updates: Although both victims had their throats slit, neither one was decapitated. That may not be a critical distinction for readers, but I feel a correction should be posted. My Spanish source reported decapitation. But I've seen some of the crime scene photos, and that's not the case. Spanish can be curiously employed by some news copy writers. They may use the word degollar ("to cut the throat") when in fact they mean decapitar ("to decapitate"), or vice versa, as if the two concepts were identical and interchangeable.
We also now know that two men, one described as about 40 and the other as 17 or 18, rented the room where the bodies were found. After checking in to the San Jorge they left for awhile, returning later with the apparently unsuspecting victims. Still later they left the hotel once again, dropping the keys off at the front desk and telling the night clerk that their female friends were "sleeping," and that they would return for them shortly. The men never came back. The women's bodies were discovered two hours later.
Previous post on Quintana Roo violence.
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