Intended to terrorize the civil population and rival cartel members , the public display of butchered bodies has replaced the traditional Mexican drug cartel practice of burying people in clandestine mass graves like in the municipality of San Fernando , Tamaulipas . These new cartel tactics were used for the first time by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel , one of the armed wings of Guzmán Loera 's cartel , in September 2011 , when they dumped over 30 bodies on a busy avenue in the state of Veracruz . Los Zetas , however , replied with their own butchery by leaving 26 corpses in the state of Jalisco and over a dozen in Sinaloa . These kinds of tactics are media measures taken by organized crime to get the attention of the public and their rival groups . Some victims in earlier body dumps turned out to be students , bakers , and brick layers — none of them with criminal records ; basically anyone who could be abducted from the streets and used for the mass killings designed to " cause terror . " Moreover , the new tactic of leaving huge body dumps may be used by the cartels to draw law enforcement into a territory to disrupt the activities of a cartel 's rival in its home or disputed territory
mass graves
2011 San Fernando massacre
Cadereyta Jiménez massacre