Mexican police found nine bodies hanging from an overpass Thursday alongside a drug cartel banner threatening rivals, and seven more corpses hacked up and dumped by the road nearby.

Just down the road were three more bodies, for a total of 19. The killing spree reported by prosecutors in the western state of Michoacan marked a return to the grisly massacres carried out by drug cartels at the height of Mexico’s 2006-2012 drug war, when piles of bodies were dumped on roadways as a message to authorities and rival gangs, the AP reports.

Two of the bodies hung by ropes from the overpass by their necks, half naked, and one of the dismembered bodies were women, Michoacan Attorney General Adrián López Solís said at a news conference. He said the killings appeared to be part of a cartel turf war.

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