On January 23, Mexicans woke up to a macabre discovery: 19 people had been burned in two trucks near the United States border. They begin to reveal details of the horror.
The horror of 19 people who died in two trucks in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico is beginning to become known. The macabre story affects not only Mexico, but Guatemala as well, as 13 of the crime victims are suspected of being indigenous migrants from a rural area of that Central American country who were trying to reach the United States.
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Families of an indigenous community in Comitancillo and San Marcos, Guatemala, are increasingly confident that they are their parents, spouses and children, 13 of the 19 victims of the first massacre reported in Mexico in 2021. According to reports from local press, these people left for Santa Anita in mid-January.
Camargo, the municipality where this city is located, is an area of contention between the Northeast Cartel, which grew out of Los Zetas, which controls part of Nuevo León, and the Gulf Cartel, which has been operating in Tamaulipas for decades. Tamaulipas, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, is the shortest route to the United States from Guatemala, but it is dangerous because of the gangs that kidnap, extort, and murder migrants.
And it is right there where the authorities are asking for an explanation, as the burned vans were under the protection of the National Migration Institute (INM) before being set on fire. What happened? The other mystery they are trying to solve is why one of the vehicles had 113 shots, but authorities did not find a single shell casing at the crime scene.
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From the outset, it was suspected that the dead were migrants attempting to reach the United States via Mexico, and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Acnudh) compared the events to the San Fernando massacre in 2010, in which 72 migrants were murdered in the same region.
The security spokesman for the Tamaulipas government, Luis Alberto Rodríguez, confirmed that the participation of a network of migrant smuggling, police and immigration services is under investigation. Last Tuesday, 12 state police officers were arrested, according to Tamaulipas Attorney General Irving Barrios. They are charged with participation in the crime, aggravated murder, abuse of authority, poor performance of administrative functions and false reports.
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Barrios gave no details as to whether the police officers had committed the murder or hid the killers, explaining that on the day of the events, other vans full of Salvadoran and Guatemalan migrants were driving through the area on their way to the United States.
The press reported that the National Migration Institute (INM) is also under investigation. Mexico’s Interior Minister Olga Sánchez Cordero, the ministry responsible for the INM, confirmed that “dozens of immigration officials” have been fired and reported to the prosecutor’s office for these events.
“We have had problems with many immigration officials, especially with this type of rights violation, and we need to recognize it in order to move forward,” said Sánchez Cordero. Yesterday, 49 Central American migrants were rescued in another town in Tamaulipas, who were locked in a building and screamed for help. “The traffickers did not let them go because they refused to pay more money than they agreed,” the authorities said.
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Mexico is experiencing a wave of violence linked to organized crime, especially drug cartels contesting routes to the United States. Since December 2006, when the federal government launched a controversial anti-drug operation, there have been more than 300,000 violent deaths, most of them criminal acts, according to official figures.