(CNN) – The lead Mexican investigator in the Falcon Lake case, Rolando Armando Flores Villegas, has been killed, his severed head delivered Tuesday in a suitcase to the Mexican military, officials told CNN. “His head was delivered to the army garrison this morning in a suitcase after he failed to report back home last night,” Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. said.
A spokesman for the attorney general of Tamaulipas state in Mexico, Ruben Dario-Rios, confirmed the killing Tuesday afternoon in a telephone interview. The report came a day after authorities in the Tamaulipas state attorney general’s office gave conflicting information on whether authorities were pursuing a pair of suspects in the case of David Michael Hartley’s disappearance.
Hartley’s wife, Tiffany, told authorities that her husband was fatally shot September 30 during a sightseeing trip the two were taking on Falcon Lake, which straddles the border. Eva Rodriguez, Flores’ secretary, said the news of his death came as a surprise. “We saw [Rolando] last night,” she said. “After he came back [from the search for Hartley] we were all together here in the office. That was the last time any of us saw him.”
She said she was not aware that Flores — whom she described as “very dedicated to his job” — had received any threats from narcotraffickers.
“What can you do?” she asked. “We’re still going to be here. We still have to work.”
Gosh, it seems we may have terrorists on the border.
@chuck
I like napalm as much as the next guy but it doesn’t work on folks using tunnels.
That falcon lake has been nothing but problems!
….wondering who advocates not tightening the border….I don’t know who that is.
#17 Nah, the problem is the lake. We should eliminate the lake. Problem solved.
And yet the US trades with this country as the lawless mess that it is, with hardly any reservations. As if it were just another neighboring country like Canada. But complain about Canada being “socialist”, because it shames the American health care system. And better regulates prescription drug prices. Oh those evil Canadians and their superior national health care! Why can’t they be more like Mexico, and allow roving bands of murderous drug traffickers, to rule the day?
I like how nobody seems to ever hold the chemical industry responsible for supplying these illegal drug makers with the solvents and reagents they need to refine the raw ingredients into the finished narcotics. It’s like some kind of magic trick. Boat loads of chemicals go in, and boat loads of drugs come out. And nobody makes the connection. When is the chemical industry going to take any responsibility for being a part of this problem, and having profited from it for so long?
The government can go after pot growers and child pornographers. But they throw their hand up, and give up, to tracking and regulating the sale and distribution of chemicals used for the production of illegal narcotics. One gets the notion that they REALLY DON’T want to stop it. Not if it costs certain concerns, some of their yearly profits.
Money, drugs and guns. Remove any one of these attributes, and that problem will disappear.
Stop the money laundering and you eviscerate crime.
Okay, I have to stop drinking coffee. I swear the first thing in my head when I saw that image was a Starbucks logo instead of the Texas Wildlife emblem.
If you want to learn more, read Charles Bowden, Murder City (2010), ISBN 978-1-56858-449-2, about the problems in Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, across from El Paso. This book is far scarier than any Halloween tale. Things are so bad that even the Mayor of Juarez and the publisher of its major newspaper live in El Paso. Bowden told his sources that he wasn’t interested in solving crimes but only in learning how the World actually works and obtained some good interviews that, unfortunately, are full of bad news. He concludes that murder has been the ultimate political weapon throughout history and that Juarez is merely showing us what our own future will be.