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The Gulf cartel has recently hung banners in Nuevo Laredo accusing Calderon's administration of protecting the less-openly bloody Sinaloa cartel, while cracking down on extremely violent rival drug gangs. While Sinaloa hit men have carried out massacres in the past, the Gulf and La Familia cartels frequently use the grizzliest methods imaginable to eliminate rivals and attack police and army patrols.

""It could be an organized crime group who was looking for an opposing group," said Alejandro Garza, the top prosecutor in the state of Nuevo León. Investigators said the gunmen entered the Holiday Inn with a man who was handcuffed and who told them to go to the fifth floor of the 17-story hotel. Once there, they barged into many rooms. They took one guest's laptop computer. Other guests reported that the gunmen looked inside and left. In Room 501, the gunmen took Luis Miguel González, a businessman from Mexico City. In Room 502, they abducted Ángel Ernesto Montes de Oca Sánchez, also from Mexico City. Down the hall, they removed Manuel Juárez, also from Mexico City, from Room 511. Nearby, in Room 512, Araceli Hernández, from Reynosa, who registered as a businesswoman, was also taken. David Salas, the hotel's receptionist, was also taken, along with computer equipment that contained the hotel's guest registry and security tapes, the authorities said. Later, armed men also took the receptionist from a hotel across the street. Initial reports that an American was among the abductees were inaccurate, American officials said. The affiliation of the gunmen was unknown, although some officials and experts on Mexico's drug gangs suggested that initial evidence pointed to the Zetas, a paramilitary group that engages in drug trafficking and other illegal activities and has been linked to violence in Monterrey. Before storming the hotels, the attackers stole trucks and other vehicles and used them to block access to the area, the authorities said. "It's absolutely unprecedented," said George W. Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and the author of "Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?" "You now have gunmen blocking off streets so that even if you had competent police, and you don't in Monterrey, they can't get to the place of operation," he said. Every day, Mexico's drug traffickers see

Esmeralda's partially clothed body was found in the cotton field's irrigation ditch eight days later, along with those of the two other women. Her pants removed and blouse and bra pulled up to her neck, Esmeralda was lying face up in the ditch, hands tied behind her back. Part of Esmeralda's right breast had been hacked away, the nipple of the other sliced off. The body was badly decomposed. The Inter-American Court found that Esmeralda and the two other girls had disappeared separately and had been held in captivity before being murdered. All three likely were raped and tortured by their captors for an unknown number of days, the court said. "The treatment they experienced during the time they remained kidnapped before their death caused them, at the very least, severe mental suffering," the court stated in its ruling, adding that Mexican officials deprived Esmeralda and the others of "the rights to life, personal integrity and personal liberty." Encouraged not to view Esmeralda's body, Monreal identified her daughter by the clothes police said she was wearing, including her socks. But even as she buried her daughter, positive identification had not been conclusive - not until four years later - when an Argentine forensics crew confirmed the murdered girl's identity with DNA testing. More bodies, same field The body of Laura Berenice Ramos, 17, a third-year high school student, also was found that day; she hadn't been heard from since calling a friend to say she was heading to a Saturday night party. Her breast also was mutilated and skin had been torn from her body. The third woman was Claudia Ivette Gonzalez, 20, who on the day she vanished had been sent home from her factory job after arriving two minutes late. She, too, had been tortured, one of her arms severed. Soon after, searchers recovered the remains of five more women in another corner of the field. They had been dead much longer; the killing had been going on for some time. Within three days