2024-01-02 22:12:10
A total of 31 migrants were kidnapped last Saturday afternoon in northern Mexico when they were traveling on a bus heading to a border city with the United States, the regional security spokesperson reported this Tuesday.
“We received a report from the driver of a Grupo Senda bus where he told us that it had been intercepted by five vehicles” driven by armed men and they took “31 of the 36” passengers, Jorge Cuéllar told Milenio TV, adding that the kidnapped “are foreigners.”
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The bus left Monterrey, in the neighboring state of Nuevo León, and had as its final destination the border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, from where the migrants are trying to cross into the United States. They were intercepted when they were near the municipality of Reynosa, another border city.
The five travelers who were not taken are of Mexican nationality, and together with the drivers they were escorted to Matamoros, the official continued.
Questioned about this by journalists, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said that the search for the migrants began that same Saturday. “The investigation is already being done,” he said.
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Cuéllar said that “there is already progress” in the investigation. “We cannot provide partial information because it could affect the investigation,” he added.
The most dangerous migration route
The US-Mexico border was the “most dangerous land migratory route in the world” in 2022, with 686 dead or missing, according to a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published in September.
Migrations to the United States reached a record number last year. According to the US Border Patrol, between October 2022 and September 2023, 2.4 million migrant entries were recorded across the southern border of the United States, a record.
Last Wednesday, the Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, visited Mexico City to hold a meeting with the Mexican president about migration.
López Obrador wrote in
With more than 3,000 km of border with the United States, Mexico is a transit and retention country for undocumented foreign migrants who clash with the restrictive immigration policies of the United States.
Foreign migrants who cross Mexico from south to north come mainly from the three Central American countries plagued by violence or poverty (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador), from the Caribbean (Haiti, Cuba) or from Venezuela.
Thousands of them are stranded on the border with the United States, in cities such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez or Matamoros.
About 40 migrants, mostly Venezuelans, died in a fire that broke out in a detention center of the National Migration Institute (INM) in Ciudad Juárez last March.
Migrants who cross Mexico are also victims of road accidents, which occurred in December 2021 in Chiapas, where 55 of them died when the trailer in which they were traveling crashed.
Likewise, they suffer violence from “coyotes” (human traffickers) and from the authorities themselves. In August 2010, 72 migrants from different countries were massacred by the extinct Los Zeta cartel in San Fernando (Tamaulipas state); Another 17 Central Americans were shot and burned in Camargo, in the same state, on January 21, 2021, in an incident for which 12 police officers were found guilty.
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