MEXICO CITY — In case decapitating their victims and dumping the heads in picnic coolers didn't make the point, the killers left a note.
"This is a warning," it said, listing an alphabet soup of Mexican police agencies and the noms de guerre of several well-known drug figures. "You get what you deserve."
The message, scrawled on a poster in black ink, accompanied four severed human heads that Mexican authorities recently found on a highway in the northern state of Durango.
The same day, police in neighboring Chihuahua state came upon five swaddled bodies accompanied by a hand- lettered placard.
"This is what happens to stupid traitors who take sides with Chapo Guzman," said the message found in Ciudad Juarez, referring to Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, the supposed leader of the main drug gang in adjacent Sinaloa state.
The killers closed with incongruous propriety: "Yours truly," they signed off, "La Linea."
Amid a wave of drug-related violence across Mexico, the dead these days are frequently accompanied by macabre calling cards known popularly as "narco-messages."
Part threat and part boast, the messages have multiplied as drug killings have risen to record levels amid a government crackdown on organized crime and deadly turf wars among traffickers.
Written by hand and often with grammatical errors, the notes are frequently publicized in Mexican news reports and on the Internet, allowing drug gangs to deliver their fearsome messages to enemies and society at large. The messages can even serve as a conversation between rivals.
Five days after police in Durango discovered the severed heads, they found another head, also with a message. It was an apparent answer to the earlier killings.
"We too can respond," the note said, according to Mexican news reports.
Analysts and law enforcement officials view the messages as a version of wartime psychological operations, lending medieval-style brutality a touch of 21st century media savvy.
"I'm the boss of this turf," read a banner in Sinaloa bearing the name of Arturo Beltran, whose faction is battling Guzman's. "And this is the beginning."
Grisly death has long been part of Mexico's illicit drug trade. But the frequency and brazenness of the narco-messages, including videos and photos of executions posted on YouTube, are a further sign that the violence has grown more savage.
