Mexican drug cartel recruits are being trained in cannibalism at barbaric “terror schools,” according to a new report.
The gruesome practice, exposed in a viral video that surfaced last month, is the latest tactic in a violent turf war between two of Mexico’s most brutal cartels — “a sort of Olympics of cruelty and sadism,” the Daily Beast reported.
“I’ve been there and there was a lot of [cannibalism],” a member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel told the outlet. “They recruit them and then they start working on them.
“First they teach them how to cut people,” said the man, who spoke on the condition that he remain anonymous. “They start by learning how to sever the extremities.”
He said the recruits are then forced to eat their victim, starting with severed fingers.
“They are given a choice of one of those pieces to eat in front of the boss,” the man said. “You have to do it without reaction or vomiting or you are beaten. If you didn’t want to [eat human flesh], they wouldn’t let you leave.”
The revelation comes in the midst of a turf war between the Jalisco crew and the Sinaloa Cartel, formerly run by jailed drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former head of international operations, said the cannibalism is drilled into recruits at several narco training sites in Mexico to turn them into “emotionless killing machines.
“The only way out of there is feet first,” Vigil told the Daily Beast. “If terror recruit school recruits show fear or commit errors or infractions, they instantly become the victims of the other trainees, who dismember and decapitate them [and] their flesh is then eaten.”
Those who survive the grotesque initiation ritual are indoctrinated into the cartel after a graduation party that includes drugs and prostitutes — but are never the same.
“Once a group of new recruits have graduated from training — that is, they have hunted down, killed, skinned, cooked and then eaten their assigned victim — they cannot go back into traditional Mexican society,” said security analyst Robert Bunker.
“They have forever been changed. Their souls have in a sense been darkened in the process,” said Bunker. “Having survived this brutal ‘trial by fire,’ they will not hesitate to carry out future cartel orders, no matter how barbaric those may be.”
He said the video of one cartel member’s “battlefield cannibalism,” which went viral after it surfaced last month, is now part of the arsenal of the brutal narcos.
