Cartel cruelty laid bare in brutal video of boy’s execution.

Cartel cruelty laid bare in brutal video of boy’s execution

A TEEN’S brutal execution shows violence of Venezuelan gangs in the grip of a cocaine and crime explosion. Warning: Graphic

TERROR is clearly visible in the boy’s eyes as he lies on his back, gagged and bound, on the dirt somewhere in Venezuela

It is night and the shirtless boy dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a black belt has his hands tied behind his bag and a length of light green cloth binds his mouth.

The boy is smooth-skinned with an undeveloped chest. He could be as young as 13.

A man’s voice speaking in Spanish can be heard as the boy’s terrified face fills the camera lens.

The man is saying something about a house, money and the command of the Venezuelan nationality worldwide.

The man has a machete-style knife and moves into the picture to slice off the boy’s ears.

It is virtually impossible to watch the rest of the video, but it has been described to news.com.au as an execution by a drug cartel.

Brutal and merciless, the video is nevertheless deliberate and has been supplied to news.com.au along with another video of a drug execution in Mexico.

This is too cruel and bloody to watch, but the message is the same.

The drug cartels of Venezuela and Mexico kidnap their rivals, torture them, execute them and record their actions as a warning.

The boy killed with a machete is probably the victim of one of Venezuela’s “megabandas”, or gangs born out of the overcrowded, unregulated prison system.

One of the most violent prison systems in the world, with almost 6500 murders committed in custody between 1999 and 2014, the jails ballooned in population, more than trebling in that time.

The megabandas govern large swathes of the country, carrying out drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion.

They operate alongside the Venezuelan cocaine syndicate, the Cartel of the Suns, which smuggles the drug from Colombia to the US via the impoverished state of Apure.

From poor border towns along the rivers across stretches of prairie, megabandas are now the de facto law.

Both brutal videos were sent by a South American friend via Whatsapp to Australian journalist Paul Corcoran and his wife.

The couple have been travelling around South America for 13 months.

“I was only able to watch the first couple of seconds of the video as they are truly horrific,” Mr Corcoran told news.com.au.

“I think for a couple of minutes about ‘Cocaine Cassie’ in Colombia.

“I don’t know if she knew what she was doing or she was clueless.

“After watching only a couple of seconds of the video you can understand why drug mules don’t talk about the kingpins of the drug cartels.”

In Mexico, four different drug cartels rule, including the notoriously sinister Sinaloa.

Just over two years ago, two West Australian surfers vanished in November 2015 while driving through Mexico.

The charred bodies of Adam Coleman and Dean Lucas, both 33, were found in their burnt out van on a gang-plagued rural road in Sinaloa state.

According to state prosecutors, the van was intercepted by a gang driving a car that flashed police-like lights.

Both men were shot and their vehicle set on fire.

Drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, a fugitive at the time of the Australians’ murder but now back in custody, led the Sinaloa drug cartel.

The cartels of Tijuana, Juarez and the Gulf have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Mexicans. In a decade of drug violence, about 26,000 have gone missing.

Last year, periodistadigital.com reported that Mexico was experiencing one of its worst moments in the field of drug trafficking, with authorities unable to keep up.

Mexican drug cartels, if viewed as a combined entity, control most of the cocaine entering the US via a number of trafficking routes.

A report last November by insightcrime.org, an analysis group of Latin American organised crime, described Venezuela as “a key transit country” for drug shipments to the US and Europe.

The New York Times has reported previously that drug traffickers can “make an airstrip on the flat prairie in a few hours by dragging a log behind a pick-up truck to smooth the ground”.

Insight Crime described the shared border as “a hub of criminal activity” for drugs, human trafficking and money laundering.

“Its long Caribbean coastline, sparsely populated jungles and plains and proximity to other Caribbean drug transit points like Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Honduras and the Dominican Republic have also contributed to Venezuela becoming a major narcotics smuggling route,” Insight Crime reported.

Thanks for reading.