Authorities continue to look into the beheading and castration of an Oklahoma man whose body was discovered behind a Walmart in New Mexico.
The body was discovered over the weekend behind a supermarket in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a prepared statement from the local police department revealed.
Since the murder, authorities have been able to identify the victim as 42-year-old Clifford Miller by running his fingerprints through law enforcement databases.
Miller has a history of drug charges including a 1995 incident for cultivating marijuana, Albuquerque’s Channel 14 News reported. According to the local station, local police stated that they have not been able to confirm a motive but are looking at the possibility that the murder could be tied to Mexican drug cartels.
As Breitbart Texas has reported, Mexican cartels routinely behead their victims in as part of their enforcement tactics aimed at spreading terror.
For almost a year, two rival factions of the Los Zetas cartel have been waging a war for control of key drug trafficking routes in Mexico. The brutal fighting has resulted in almost daily beheadings and dismemberments.
While not common in the U.S., Mexican cartels have carried out targeted beheadings north of the border. Breitbart Texas reported on the Spring Break 2015 beheading of an illegal immigrant by a cell of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel allegedly headed by a corrupt U.S. Border Patrol agent. The victim’s headless body was found in the waters off the Texas beach resort city of South Padre Island. In that case, authorities have arrested various men including the agent for their roles in the torture, beheading and then dumping of the body in the water–the victim’s head was never found.
More recently in August 2016, San Antonio Police and other law enforcement agencies began a homicide investigation after the discovery of a headless, burning body in a dumpster. In addition to the decapitation, the victim’s hands had also been severed.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.