A 22-year-old man from Houston and his 16-year-old friend are hauled out of a minivan in Mexico, shot execution style by thugs in a black Lincoln Continental, and left dead in the dirt.

The body of a 65-year-old nurse from Brownsville is found floating in the Rio Grande after a visit to a Mexican beauty salon.

An American retiree, an ex-Marine, is stabbed to death as he camps on a Baja beach with his dog.

More than 200 U.S. citizens have been slain in Mexico’s escalating wave of violence since 2004 — an average of nearly one killing a week, according to a Houston Chronicle investigation into the deaths.

Rarely are the killers captured.

The U.S. State Department tracks most American homicides abroad, but the department releases minimal statistics and doesn’t include victims’ names or details about the deaths. The Chronicle examined hundreds of records to document the personal tragedies behind them.

“I’m no longer the same person,” said Paula Valdez, a Houston mother whose son was slain near her childhood home in Mexico’s Guerrero state in 2004.

More U.S. citizens suffered unnatural deaths in Mexico than in any other foreign country — excluding military killed in combat zones — from 2004 to 2007, State Department statistics show.

Most died in the recent outbreaks of violence in border cities — Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo.

Although, historically, even Mexico’s most violent urban centers had homicide rates below those of major U.S. cities, recent attacks and border violence driven by drug demand have escalated well beyond limited narco-executions.

Juarez last year ranked among the world’s most murderous cities.

The Chronicle analysis showed some American homicide victims were involved in organized crime. The dead include at least two dozen victims labeled hitmen, drug dealers, human smugglers or gang members, based on published investigators’ accusations. Others were drug users or wanted for crimes in the United States.

But in at least 70 other cases, U.S. citizens appear to have been killed while in Mexico for innocent reasons: visiting family, taking a vacation, or simply living or working there.

Locations and intentions
In an interview with the Chronicle, Mexican Congressman Juan Francisco Rivera Bedoya of Nuevo Leon, a former prosecutor who heads the national Public Safety Commission, said he believes most American victims get killed after crossing the border to participate in illegal activities or venturing into unsafe areas.

“Tourists visiting cathedrals, museums and other cultural centers are not at risk,” he said.

Across Mexico, more than 5,000 lives were taken last year, including police, public officials, journalists and bystanders, with seemingly little regard for age, social status or nationality, Mexican authorities report.

Mutilated bodies have been draped on highway overpasses or posed in schoolyards and public squares. Authorities have uncovered mass graves known as narcofosas and body disposal sites, where killers dissolved corpses in barrels of chemicals.

At least 40 Americans were among those killed and dumped in gruesome methods favored by cartel killers, the Chronicle found. Two Texan teens were victims of an American serial killer in Nuevo Laredo, who bragged to a friend in a recorded cell phone call that he stewed their remains in vats.

Recent border victims include at least 15 U.S.-born children and teenagers.

In 2008, Austin Kane Danielsen, an 18-year-old Kansan visiting Mexico for the first time, was attacked, beaten and kicked after leaving a disco in Matamoros. His attackers used a pickup to drag his brutalized body 30 yards and dumped it next to a railroad track.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/side2/6252174.html