LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to newspaper photographs, signed messages lied near or on top of the corpses, whose feet were tied to a street pole. The messages claimed to be from The Knights Templar, an offshoot of the pseudo-religious La Familia drug cartel. Drug gangs are notorious for leaving threatening messages at crime scenes.

The bodies were found early Sunday in the beach town. Zihuatanejo is popular with both Mexican and U.S. tourists. The recent massacre came on the heels of less than two weeks ago, when 35 tortured bodies were dumped onto a main avenue in the Gulf coast seaport of Veracruz.

While police did not release a motive for the recent dumping, but drug cartels have been battling each other in Pacific coast resort cities. Police reported another homicide in Zihuatanejo shortly before the bodies were dumped.

South of Zihuatanejo, in Acapulco, 10 men and two women were killed in separate attacks Saturday and early Sunday, including one in which gunmen stormed a bar and shot a couple dead.

In addition, three other men were gunned down inside a taxi cab on a popular avenue of Acapulco Saturday, police said Sunday in a news release. Two gunmen shot to death a 22-year-old man near a Wal-Mart store on the beachside avenue Costera Miguel Aleman on Saturday.

Drug-related crime is on the rise in Acapulco and other cities in the southwestern state of Guerrero since the arrest of Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez, a Texas native captured last year who is suspected of trying to seize control of the Beltran Leyva cartel following the death of its leader.

Guerrero police chief Ramon Almonte told The Associated Press that agents have found posters at homicide scenes with threatening messages signed by the four cartels plus smaller, local gangs that work as enforcement wings.

Grotesque violence is an increasingly common occurrence in Mexico's ongoing drug war. In Mexico City, police found two severed human heads on a street near a major military base Monday. It was the first multiple decapitation in the capital since January 2008, when two heads were found near the city's international airport.

© 2011, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.