Tag: cartel

2022 CANNIBAL NEWS and VIEWS

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News, On cannibalsLeave a comment

What a year! These are some of the cannibalism stories, films and songs that arrived in 2022, with links back to the original reports, so that you can look up the ones that catch your interest, and so that this blog does not take all of 2023 to read.

January

  • A German man dubbed by the press the ‘cannibal teacher’ was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Stefan R., a 41-year-old maths and chemistry teacher, had apparently searched on the dark web for terms such as “long pig” and “fatten and slaughter people”. The man claimed his victim died of natural causes after a (presumably vigorous) sexual tryst, and he had removed the man’s penis “since my DNA could still have possibly been present due to the oral sex I performed”. In other words, he didn’t mind a bit of mutilation and perhaps cannibalism, but was concerned not to be “outed” as gay.
  • Djalma Campos Figueiredo, 46, was arrested in Brazil. He had been sentenced by the Court of Justice of Rondonia in the city of Porto Velho to 42 years in prison for several counts of aggravated murder but had escaped custody. The Civil Police alleged he would eat his victims’ eyes and ears and drink their blood.
  • Meanwhile, the Zamfara (NW Nigeria) State Police Command arrested a 57-year-old man, Aminu Baba, for allegedly eating and selling human body parts. Baba and three others were arrested after the murder of a nine-year-old boy. The Police Commissioner reported that Baba had “confessed that he usually ate the body parts and identified the throat as the most delicious part. He also sold some of the human parts to his customers.”

February

  • In Afghanistan, we discovered that the Taliban were rounding up drug addicts and putting them in rehabilitation centres to detox, which is a nice thought, except that they gave them little or no food (“cold turkey” does not count), so they apparently resorted to cannibalism.

April

We have been following the case of an Idaho man, James David Russell, who was accused of killing and eating a neighbour in September 2021. This was a big deal for us in Cannibal Studies, because Idaho is still the only state in the Union to have a law against cannibalism, a statute that hit the books in 1990, but has never been used. In April, Russell was deemed fit to stand trial.

  • In the Indian state of Assam, a man who had had perhaps more than a few drinks smelt cooking meat in a crematorium in a Hindu cremation ground. He helped himself to a few portions of the body, but was caught by villagers and handed over to police; but not before he had eaten about half of his purloined flesh.

May

  • A man calling himself The Chinese Zodiac Killer was arrested by the FBI in Jefferson County, New York for sending letters to media outlets, government offices including the White House, and other organisations, claiming he killed people and ate their flesh, and that he plans to kill more. He seems to have based his story on the Zodiac killer who terrorised California in the late 1960s. The original Zodiac Killer (who was not accused of cannibalism) was never caught, but this one was easily found, posting his threatening letters (what century is this again?) at the same letterbox he had previously used.

June

  • The case against James David Russell (see above in April) went to preliminary trial. Sadly, the judge threw out the charge of cannibalism, saying there was insufficient evidence to pursue it, and went with the rather more mundane offence of first-degree murder. Since this has a life sentence attached, the practical effect of dropping the cannibalism charge is negligible, but as the first cannibalism case in the USA, it would have been fascinating.
  • A rumour swept the Internet that the actress Anne Hathaway was a cannibal, based on a cryptic Tweet saying “police didn’t find human remains and evidence of cannibalism in her LA home that she sold in 2013.” We were all later astonished to discover the whole thing was a hoax.
  • The effects of the war in The Ukraine were starting to be felt in Europe and the UK (whose people often do not think it’s part of Europe). The Russians fell gladly on a statement from one Jeremy Clarkson (a car enthusiast) that “Hunger makes people eat their neighbours” to predict that the British will soon be a nation of cavemen feeding off each other. Of course, if you’ve ever been to a soccer match…
  • industrial/electronic music duo SKYND released their tenth song, called ARMIN MEIWES, about the German man who killed and ate a willing volunteer.
  • Back in the USA, the Utah County Attorney felt he had to go public to deny accusations that he and his wife are cannibals. Honest. I wouldn’t/couldn’t make this stuff up.

July

  • The New York Times raised the temperature of the culture wars with its review of several books, movies and TV shows about cannibalism, culminating in the (somewhat tongue in cheek) statement that “Cannibalism has a time and place… that time is now.” The right-wing press predictably jumped on the story accusing the NYT of everything from irresponsibility to Satanism.
  • Also in New York, Steven Spielberg whipped out his cell phone to record Marcus Mumford singing his new work, a haunting song called “CANNIBAL“. The song might be about love and lockdown, or it could involve child abuse.

August

September

  • DISCOVERY+ launched a three-part series called HOUSE OF HAMMER. The series explored allegations from various girlfriends of the actor Armie Hammer that he was a cannibal, or had at least threatened them with cannibalism. It also examined his relatives, many of whom seemed to be presented as even worse specimens than Armie.
  • Russia discovered the war was not going well in Ukraine, and started recruiting murderers and rapists to be sent to the front as reinforcements. Also – one cannibal, Yegor Komarov, whose man-eating exploits we learned about in December 2021.

October

  • In the Indian state of Kerala, there were allegations that a couple who ran a massage centre were bringing women home not so much for massages, but for human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism.
  • In the US state of Michigan, Mark David Latunski, who had been arrested in 2019 for killing and eating his Grindr date, finally came to trial and entered a plea of guilty.

November

  • Issei Sagawa, the “Kobe Cannibal”, died of pneumonia at the age of 73. Sagawa had killed and eaten a young Dutch fellow-student in Paris in 1981. He was found insane and sent back to Japan, where he was released and lived free ever since, making movies, writing books, and even becoming a restaurant reviewer.
  • Rapper Comethazine released Bawskee 5, the 12th song on which was called “CANNIBAL“.
  • Back in Brazil again! A patient in the Municipal Hospital of Nuovo Hamburgo in the state of Rio Grande do Sul attacked other patients, screamed and spat at people, and eventually chewed off his own fingers and toes. A witness said “while he was chewing his own meat, you could hear the crackling of bones in his mouth”.

December

  • Mark Latunski, 52, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on December 15 for the murder of his Grindr date three years previously. Kevin Bacon, 25, had been killed and mutilated by Latunski on December 24, 2019 at Latunski’s Bennington home. Latunski pleaded guilty in September to killing Bacon and eating one of his testicles, after stabbing him in the back and slitting his throat. In a victims’ impact statement, the victim’s father said “Evil does exist, and it touched us.”

On the screen

The big news on streaming television this year was Jeffrey Dahmer, the “Milwaukee Cannibal”, who took Netflix by storm with not one but two titles, despite having been killed by a fellow prisoner in 1994.

  • Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s docudrama called “MONSTER: THE JEFFREY DAHMER STORY“, which logged nearly two hundred million hours of watching in its first week of release
  • Joe Berlinger’s third series of CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER, featuring previously unheard defence attorney tapes of interviews with Dahmer.

Lots of new cannibalism feature films in 2022, some of which I will catch up with next year:

  • Luca Guadagnino’s BONES AND ALL, featuring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as teenage cannibals in a tender and gory road movie, has been getting heaps of publicity.
  • Mimi Cave’s FRESH is a charming romcom, until the knives come out. A fascinating insight into ultimate consumerism.
  • Leatherface came back (again!), this time older but no wiser. This is the ninth (!) instalment of the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE franchise, and went straight to Netflix.
  • John Ainslie’s DO NOT DISTURB depicts a couple renewing their romance by taking peyote, but finding that this particular variant of the drug awakens a taste for human flesh.
  • Leatherface came out to play again, this time as a fan-film prequel called THE SAWYER MASSACRE. Made on a shoestring but arguably superior to the other sequels and prequels.
  • Liam Regan’s EATING MISS CAMPBELL, in which a vegan, goth student falls in love with her new English teacher and develops a taste for human flesh.
  • Sean Patrick Flanery’s enjoyable road movie FRANK AND PENELOPE, in which a couple take on a cannibal cult in the wilds of Texas.
  • Timo Vuorensola’s JEEPERS CREEPERS REBORN, the umpteenth take on a supernatural tale of the demon who eats people and incorporates their bodies, but only every 23 years.
  • Fred Olen Ray’s PIRANHA WOMEN offers a totally believable story of women who turn into man-eaters because of an anti-cancer treatment.
  • THE MENU has Ralph Fiennes as a demented chef and Anya Taylor-Joy as the fly, as it were, in his menu plan. There is no obvious cannibalism involved in the movie, but there is some speculation on-line about the final cheeseburger.
  • ‘Ted Lasso goes cannibal’ in Adam Leader & Richard Oakes’ FEED ME, a jolly rant in which a grieving man wants to die, and a nearby cannibal wants to help him, but by instalment.

And now for something completely different

From out of the future, we have some new AI software of which Shital Shah, a senior research engineer at Microsoft, said:

ChatGPT is “a large language model that has been trained to generate human-like responses to text input.” In other words, you can ask it questions and receive (often) intelligent answers, rather than a series of links, like Google. You can try it for free (at the moment) here.

Naturally, I asked it questions such as “is meat murder” and it replied:

“Ultimately, whether or not eating meat is considered murder is a matter of personal belief and moral judgement.”

So, I barked back, like a prosector out for a conviction, “Where does that leave the cannibal?”

“Whether or not eating other humans is considered murder would also be a matter of personal belief and moral judgement. Most people would consider cannibalism to be morally reprehensible, as it involves the killing and consuming of another human being. However, there may be some individuals who do not see it that way, and their personal beliefs and moral judgement would dictate their view on the matter.”

The Internet has spoken, at last.

CANNIBAL SCHOOL – Mexican cartel recruits are being taught to eat rival sicarios

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News2 Comments

In the past 18 months, the war between CJNG (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion) and the Sinaloa cartels has been intensifying. Sinaloa is the largest, while CJNG is arguably the most violent.

The Mexican state of Zacatecas is their main battleground.

Sicarios (cartel assassins) on both sides fight for territory, and the profits from the production of synthetic drugs, particularly fentanyl, in that region.

They also profit mightily from kidnapping refugees trying to cross into the USA, and cooking the ones whose ransoms are not paid.

Violence in this war is not just done, but is seen to be done, with videos being released onto social media showing various atrocities, in order to demoralise the opposing cartel members. An earlier video involved a CJNG soldier using a spoon to remove the eyes of a captured rival.

A new video (widely and ironically known as “Sponsored By Adidas” due to the killers’ love of that brand of shoe) is circulating on the Internet now. It shows a soldier from the CJNG crouching over the disembowelled body of a man from a rival cartel, supposedly the Sinaloa. The man opens the corpse’s chest and removes an organ, either the heart of liver (some say a lung), and bites into it, then seems to offer it to the corpse to see if it wants a bite.

This seems to be the latest escalation of cartel violence. Before 2006, beheadings were unknown; but now there are dozens of beheadings every year in Mexico. How do you up the stakes from beheading? The previous video from a cartel, called “Funky Town” showed a live and conscious prisoner having his face flayed from his head, later to be sewn onto a soccer ball. But the big new thing for the cartels now seems to be cannibalism.

Man-eating appears to have become a requirement for new recruits to CJNG at its training camps or “cannibal schools.” One member of CJNG told a journalist that there is widespread cannibalism at the camps. Recruits are taught how to cut fingers and toes, and eat them They then graduate onto larger internal organs. He reported (anonymously) that:

“You have to do it without reacting or vomiting or you are beaten. If you didn’t want to [eat human flesh] they wouldn’t let you leave, they had you there.”

The video in question can be found on the Internet if you look hard enough. I am not posting links, because those who don’t want to see it might accidentally click, and those who do are gorehound enough to find it.

Why is cannibalism such a popular strategy for terrifying the enemy? Because there is no higher form of humiliation, no greater insult, than being killed, eaten, and then crapped out of the anus of your enemy.

“FERAL” (American Horror Stories, episode 6 – August 2021)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films, Cannibals on TV1 Comment

Last week’s blog was not a film or TV story but a real event, the account of displaced people being kidnapped for ransom by Mexican cartels, and chopped up for their meat if the money was not found. This segues nicely into this week’s blog, in which a boy disappears and the parents suspect a cartel kidnapping, but in fact (spoiler alert) he has joined a group of feral cannibals.

The response to news of cartels, kidnapping and cannibalism is to shake our heads and ask how people can DO such things. The assumption behind such a question is that we have ‘progressed’ and, while cannibalism may have been a part of our savage past, it should have been left behind in today’s enlightened civilisation. Yet we are aware that cannibalism continues to exist, and that it can reappear when food is short, as in the siege of Leningrad, or for revenge like the man who killed and ate up to thirty women because he resented their rejection of him, or sexual attraction and desire to keep the person with us (or within us) like Jeffrey Dahmer and Armin Meiwes, or just for fun and profit, like Fritz Haarmann.

Sigmund Freud wrote of an ORAL SADISTIC or CANNIBALISTIC STAGE, which coincides with the time babies’ teeth start to erupt. We recognise our mother’s breast as external to us, and wish to retain ownership, by biting and swallowing it. At the same time, the aggression is tempered or sometimes instead magnified by anxiety at the potential loss of the other (mothers don’t like to be bitten) or fear that the much stronger parent will instead choose to devour the child. Our first instance of logical reasoning – if I can bite her, she can surely bite me harder. These early influences may sink into the sludge at the bottom of our unconscious minds as we grow up, but they remain there, and can reappear at any time in different forms.

It is tempting, therefore, to see acts of cannibalism as simply throwbacks – to our earlier social models (savagery) or to psychotic deviance dredged up from tortured unconscious memories. Civilisation, we think, can conquer such eruptions. But not always, and not in this episode of American Horror Stories, another episode of which we considered recently.

This one is set in, and against, nature. A man, woman and three-year-old boy are driving into Kern Canyon National Park in California for a camping trip. The father wants to return to nature, get them out of their comfort zone. The mother points out that “out of the comfort zone” is equivalent to “uncomfortable”, and the little boy wants a TV. A phone call on the way tells us that the father is a lawyer defending a “greedy-ass corporation” – the type that exploits and destroys the environment for profit. This is going to be about nature, red in tooth and claw, and revenge.

The boy, Jacob, disappears while camping with his family. Ten years later, his father, Jay, is approached by a hunter who tells him that he believes Jacob is alive, kidnapped by a drug cartel running pot farms in the park. The hunter leads Jay and Jacob’s mother, Addy, into the woods to look for him. The Park Ranger, who for some reason is Australian, warns then not to go, but of course they head off and, like last week’s Mexican abduction, it’s a trap.

Deep in the woods, they are attacked by wild, human-like creatures, who eat their abductor. Jay and Addy seek refuge at the Park Ranger’s station, where the Ranger tells them that the National Park Service was created by the government

“…to keep Americans from things that would kill and eat them.”

These are feral humans, he says, possibly descendants of Vikings, or of mountain men who never came down from the mountains, or maybe Civil War soldiers who never surrendered. Or people who just checked out, had enough of the world. In any case, they have gone back to nature, gone feral, and so are a threat to the civilised, cultured humans who use and abuse the natural world. The Ranger tells them there are are tribes of ferals in every National Park – over 2,000 people have vanished from the parks over the years. There are certainly people living off the grid in the wild areas of the world, but not necessarily feral cannibals. Why is it kept top secret?

“Governments need their citizens to believe they are in control. Plus, the National Parks generate billions of dollars in revenue every year. Capitalism, baby! If people knew there were feral cannibals running around, attendance might drop off.”

The Station is attacked by the feral cannibals, and the ranger is killed. Jay and Addy are taken to the leader of the creatures, seated on a throne of skulls, looking remarkably like a Renaissance Jesus.

Of course it is Jacob (speculation is already mounting that Jacob, the cannibal king, might get his own spin-off series). Jacob seems to recognise his parents, but when one of the creatures asks Jacob who they are he answers, “dinner“. Freud would have enjoyed the feast that follows: the “primal hordes” overthrowing and eating the father; Jacob, frozen in his infantile cannibalistic phase, tasting his parents’ blood.

This episode is also a study in what Georgio Agamben calls the “anthropological machine”, a paradigm that we use to separate ourselves from other animals. In the pre-modern machine, non-humans were depicted as human-like to draw the distinction – we spoke of werewolves, minotaurs and cyclops; in this episode they evoke Bigfoot or the Australian equivalent, the Yowie. But the modern anthropological machine instead declares certain humans to be less than human or else inhuman – race, ability, gender or social status may be used to divide us into human and “other”. The ferals are inhuman because they have regressed to savagery, chosen nature over civilisation. For hundreds of thousands of years, we existed in small clans, and anyone outside the immediate family was assumed inhuman. We need to fear, and sometimes eat, the outsider, because we evolved to do so.

We like to think that this is all ancient history. But our sanguine belief in social progress lulls us into supposing that that acts of cannibalism (as depicted in this blog thecannibalguy.com, for example), are simply aberrations, throwbacks to a savage past, or unfortunate outbursts by deranged or psychopathic individuals. What this confident diagnosis ignores is the inherent violence of the human species.

As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out, the civilising process has simply presented a “redeployment of violence”. Instead of hunting animals or, more recently, slaughtering them in the street in what used to be called “the shambles”, we now mass produce death in huge factories called abattoirs, which are placed away from residential areas and surrounded by high walls and sophisticated security systems. Violence against our fellow humans has been similarly redeployed, with drones and smart bombs replacing hand to hand conflict. Fear of social sanctions or maybe divine punishment keep us in control of our internalised aggressive drives against our fellow citizens, at least some of the time. But at any moment, for reasons usually unclear, we can loose this violence, together with the voracious appetite that characterises consumerism, and redeploy it against adversaries. Call it feral, as per this episode, or perhaps, instead, call it authentic, cannibalistic humanity.