David Hartley: Mexican Drug Cartel Murder of American Jet-Skiing with Wife May All Have been a Mere “Misunderstanding”

 

Tiffany Young-Hartley: According to Stratfor, the Los Zetas drug cartel destroyed her husband's body the same day they murdered him.


By Nicholas Stix

David Hartley is the American who was jet-skiing with his wife, Tiffany, on September 30 on Falcon Lake, which straddles the U.S.-Mexican border. The Hartleys had gone to the lake “to photograph a historic, half-submerged church.” Three speedboats of drug cartel “pirates” began firing on the couple and, according to Mrs. Hartley, shot her husband four times, including twice in the back of the head, killing him. I say, according to Mrs. Hartley, because her husband’s body has yet to be found.

Some anonymous Internet commenters argued initially that Mrs. Hartley had murdered her husband, and used narcoterror as a cover story.

A Mexican police official, Rolando Armando Flores Villegas, the police commander of Miguel Alemán State, investigated the matter. Commander Flores’ severed head was delivered in a suitcase to the “Mexican military’s Eight Zone headquarters in Reynosa on Oct. 12.”

Surviving Mexican law enforcement officials insist that there was no connection between Hartley’s disappearance and the decapitation of Commander Flores.

That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it. In their shoes, I would, too.

Since the decapitation that had nothing to do with Hartley’s murder,

Mexico suspended its search for David Hartley indefinitely on Thursday, an official said.

“There is a recess,” Ruben Dario Rios Lopez, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office in Tamaulipas, told The Monitor of McAllen in a copyright story in its online edition Thursday.

[“Mexican lake victim possibly mistaken for other,” by Alexandra Olson, Associated Press/Breitbart, October 14, 11:56 PM.]

A recess.

A new explanation of Hartley’s murder has been proferred by Stratfor, the Austin, Texas-based, private intelligence group, which deals with international security. In “Cartel Shooting at Falcon Lake a Case of Mistaken Identity?” Stratfor argues that the members of the Los Zetas drug cartel, who are believed to have murdered David Hartley, had mistaken the Hartleys for members of their rival, the Gulf cartel.

Given the current security situation in the border region, particularly in Mexico, many have speculated at the possible involvement of drug trafficking organizations in this case. Those suspicions only grew when the decapitated head of the Tamaulipas state investigator on the case, Rolando Armando Flores Villegas, was delivered in a suitcase to the Mexican military’s Eight Zone headquarters in Reynosa on Oct. 12. STRATFOR sources have confirmed cartel involvement and said that Hartley appears to be a victim of mistaken identity.

The war between the Los Zetas and Gulf cartels that began in January 2010 has engulfed the entire Tamaulipas border region and spread both into interior regions such as Nuevo Leon, Veracruz and Hidalgo and across the border into South Texas. After years of working together, each group possesses intimate knowledge of the other’s operations, which has led to both sides being extremely cautious and increasing counterintelligence operations against their rival. Falcon Lake, particularly around the Old Guerrero region, is a notorious staging point for large amounts of marijuana en route to the United States, so it became a focal point of counterintelligence operations for both cartels.

David Hartley worked for a U.S. oil and gas company with operations in Reynosa, and the couple had lived in the city for two years, only moving back across the border to McAllen in the past few months. The vehicle the Hartleys had used to tow their two Jet Skis to the U.S. side of Falcon Lake on Sept. 30 still had Tamaulipas state license plates. STRATFOR sources say Los Zetas scouts, known as halcones, had identified the Hartleys’ truck as it made its way to Falcon Lake and watched the two set out on their Jet Skis toward the Old Guerrero region. Both Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas operatives have been known to conduct surveillance and countersurveillance operations on personal watercraft, so these scouts thus identified the Hartleys as possible Gulf surveillance assets, given their vehicle’s license plate and their method and direction of travel on Falcon Lake. Their description and position was radioed to Los Zetas members on the Mexican side of the lake, after which the couple was apparently confronted by Zetas enforcers….

[“Cartel Shooting at Falcon Lake a Case of Mistaken Identity?” by Stratfor, October 13, 2010 | 1741 GMT.]

In Matamoros, Mexico, U.S. consulate spokesman Brian Quigley echoed Stratfor’s analysis.

(Citing the dangerous border situation, David Hartley’s employer had ordered him to move back to Texas. But Hartley’s former employer and Stratfor must both be wrong. After all, as I previously reported, Latina Lista insists that border security is “a non-existent problem.”)

“Mistaken identity.” Well, that explains everything. Except that it doesn’t.

In a civilized society, people are virtually never murdered, based on a “misunderstanding,” and civilized people do not rationalize away murders, claiming they were the products of “misunderstandings.” Such is the conduct of savages.

A good 10 years ago, a black man either walked or bicycled past another black man traveling in the opposite direction on Mott Avenue, in Far Rockaway, Queens. The driver shot the stranger dead in his tracks.

A witness “explained” that the driver had mistakenly thought that the dead man had “disrespected” him, and that the whole thing had been a “misunderstanding.”

Except that it wasn’t. A civilized man doesn’t go and kill someone who just passed by, because he “thinks” the guy disrespected him. Heck, a civilized man doesn’t kill him, even if he knows for a fact that he disrespected him. And no civilized third party chalks the murder up to a “misunderstanding.”

Ditto for the notion that someone was murdered for being “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Such an explanation may suffice for someone being hit by a bolt of lightning, but not for someone being murdered, which is a willful act, requiring evil intent (“mens rea”). The rationalization suggests that murder is a natural catastrophe. But if that were so, it wouldn’t be a crime. Indeed, in some parts of America, increasing numbers of people deny that murder is a crime.

Similarly, we hear today of murderers who merely were guilty of making “bad decisions” or “mistakes.”

Such murders and their rationalizations are the stuff of the jungle, not of civilization.

That’s not a knock on Stratfor, because jungle reports are their stock in trade. That’s why we have a border, which the President is constitutionally obligated and sworn to protect: To keep the jungle out.

(Oddly enough, many of the same people who would redefine murder into a natural catastrophe, seek to redefine the lawful killing by a policeman or civilian of a criminal suspect into murder. Thus, the people who seek to de-criminalize murder, while criminalizing the proper administration of the law, are engaged in sophistry in the service of evil.)

Mexico is a jungle, as are increasing swaths of today’s America. By 1950, very little of America was jungle, but for over 50 years, a powerful movement has sought, with great success, to turn most of the country into one. That movement was known, initially, as the “civil rights movement.” (“Civil rights” has come to mean the opposite of what it originally did—the rights of citizens.) Today, it is known as “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” and “human rights.”

You can have “civil rights”/”multiculturalism”/”diversity”/ “human rights,” or you can have civilization, but you can’t have both.