Gunmen kidnap 31 migrants in Mexico as the border crisis fades
The 911 call came from a driver on a busy stretch of road near Mexico’s border with the United States: armed men in balaclavas had just kidnapped 31 migrants from the bus he was driving.
Citing a growing kidnapping crisis in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, authorities are tracking cell phone signals and deploying search and rescue dogs in an effort to find the migrants, who were taken over the weekend. They came from Venezuela, Honduras, Ecuador and Colombia, but also from Mexico.
The episode underlines how the current spike in migration to the United States is turning parts of northern Mexico into a minefield for asylum seekers and migrants from around the world.
Tens of thousands of people have made their way to the border area, where they are encouraged to use a U.S. Customs and Border Protection app to present themselves at a legal border crossing to enter the United States.
But as the migrants bide their time, cartels are seizing the opportunity of kidnapping for ransom.
Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Wednesday that authorities have managed to reduce the number of kidnappings across the country, but he acknowledged that groups kidnapping migrants were particularly active in Tamaulipas and other states, including San Luis Potosí, Nuevo León and Coahuila.
Mexican Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said Wednesday that the latest case in Tamaulipas had also attracted attention given the number of people targeted. “These types of events happened with one, two, three migrants,” Ms. Rodríguez said, “but this number in this area is atypical.”
The mass kidnapping in Tamaulipas on Saturday evening is one of the biggest cases since May last year, when nearly 50 migrants, including 11 children, were arrested. kidnapped from a bus in the central state of San Luis Potosí. Officials mobilized 650 police and army troops to search for the migrants, all of whom were found in an area where another mass kidnapping took place a month earlier.
In Tamaulipas, migrant kidnapping is becoming a reliable revenue stream for criminal groups operating in the border region, including the Gulf Cartel and the Northeast Cartel.
Jorge Cuéllar, Tamaulipas state security spokesman, confirmed in a telephone interview that another bus heading to Matamoros was attacked in a separate incident on Monday. Five of the passengers, all Venezuelans who were held in a white car, were later rescued by National Guard officers.
The kidnappings came as Mexican authorities tried to strengthen security along the border in late December, when families on both sides of the border typically gather to celebrate the holidays.
Mr. López Obrador told reporters that specific details about the investigation into the kidnapping of the 31 migrants were being withheld because “a certain degree of secrecy is required.”
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, said that four of the kidnapped migrants were Colombian nationals, and that the Colombian embassy in Mexico worked with Mexican authorities to obtain their release.
Organizations focused on the migration crisis at the border say the case reflects the pitfalls of shifting U.S. policies toward migrants.
“Organized crime has been able to use migration as a business precisely because so many migrants and asylum seekers have no available legal path,” said Stephanie Brewer, Mexico director of the Washington Office on Latin America.
The result, she said, has been migrants and asylum seekers making the journey north on their own or paying an organized crime group to cross the border. But just as migrant smuggling has become a lucrative business, so has migrant kidnapping.
“So they will kidnap migrants because those migrants were trying to travel with or pay a rival group, perhaps the migrants had not paid any group for the crossing, or it is simply an economic proposition so that their relatives can be extorted for profit,” she said. Brewer said. “And that is a model that has been around for years.”
After a pandemic-era border administration led to the expulsion of many migrants from the United States to Mexico, the advocacy group Human Rights First at least followed suit 13,480 reports of kidnapping, murder, torture, rape and other violent attacks on migrants and asylum seekers.
Although the rule, known as Title 42, ended last year, migration policies that keep people in northern Mexico in limbo have made them easy prey for organized crime groups, added Ms. Brewer, who recently traveled to the Arizona-Mexico border, where she found dozens of people waiting for appointments with border officials.
“This example of mass kidnapping should be a loud cry for an end to the policy that is trapping thousands of people on the Mexican side of the border,” she said, “or putting them in the hands of organized forces criminal groups to find a way to the border. the United States.”