A brutal murder occurred on the Blackfeet reservation several years ago. Some locals, including Irma Skunkcap who is related to the victim blame Mexican drug cartels.
“Well here in Montana, I’m from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and throughout the years the cartel has been on the reservation for quite a while and it has affected not only my family but many families, and the last couple years ago I had a relative that was murdered, dismembered, they found his body way out in Browning area in a rural area. We didn’t realize how bad the dismemberment was. They had cut off his head and arms and we don’t know if his feet were gone. I don’t know. I didn’t look. The family was really upset, and they had an idea who did it, and they talked about it, and they were pretty sure that was a cartel, but then this individual took the blame for everything. I think he’s in prison right now. He was just a young guy that said he did it, but family members have said that it was the cartel.” -Irma Skunkcap
Montana Detective Guy Baker who specializes in violent crime has a different opinion.
“So that case you’re referring to, unless there was a similar homicide in Browning where the hands and feet were missing and the person was bound, I do remember when that one came out, and obviously it had the appearance of possibly a cartel hit, but I think that a person was arrested and convicted of that, and it was a local Browning person. So it wasn’t necessarily a cartel hit, but I think a lot of street level gangsters, sureños and norteños gang affiliates, they are going to lead people to believe or if people here think oh he’s got cartel connections they are not going to correct them on that, because the cartel, just the name has a sinister, fearful tone to it, and I think a lot of times or at least in my experience on the drug conspiracies our task force does we’ll hear from people that oh they’re cartel connected when they’re just Hispanic gang members from Washington and California. So, I think the cartel has a bigger influence than people realize, but I don’t think that the cartel is as widely involved as a lot of people think. That’s my opinion.”-Guy Baker
