GOPES: the story of the fearsome Tamaulipas police force involved in the migrant massacre

When state agents in Northern Mexico shot and killed 19 people – including at least 14 Guatemalan migrants – in late January, it was a tragedy that critics claim. authorities had already warned it could happen.

In 2019, prosecutors accused the same state police company of Tamaulipas, then by different name, of forcibly removing eight people from their homes in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, forcing them to don military-style uniforms and wearing them up. . to vehicles to make them look like criminals and shoot them.

Now a dozen agents of the Group of Special Operations (GOPES) – of 150 elements – have been ordered to be arrested to prosecute them for the murder of at least 14 migrants and two Mexicans committed on a rural road in the town of Camargo, close to the Texas border. The bodies were burned and so charred that this prevented the identification of three other victims.

Authorities had already received abundant warnings about problems with that police unit, created last year with the remains of a group of special forces charged with the 2019 massacre and other atrocities. A federal lawmaker even pushed for a non-binding resolution in the Mexican Congress in January to protest the beatings and robberies perpetrated by that company.

In November, a business association of Tamaulipas accused GOPES agents of this Break into one of its members’ home and steal cash, appliances and other belongings. The group said the victim was even taking photos through her security cameras, showing uniformed officers with guns on their backs robbing her home.

The complaint was ignored and no steps were ever taken to get the company under control.

If at that time they had, “If they had turned to see, we might not be mourning the deaths of 19 people”said Marco Antonio Mariño, vice president of security of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce in Tamaulipas.

For more than a decade, well-equipped rival drug trafficking groups have waged the longest and bloodiest war for control of territory in Mexican history. Gangs of armed men with names like “La Tropa del infierno” regularly circulate in vans with handmade armor.

The cartels co-opted so many municipal police forces in Tamaulipas that the state decided to disband them all and rely more on state police officers, who are better trained. When the federal government withdrew marines, who used to support much of the powerful weapons for state police forces, encouraged the state government to create elite units such as the GOPES.

The reputation of the GOPES is so terrifying that the United States government, which has trained some of its elements, has sought to distance itself from that company, both of which it refers to by the previous initials CAIET (Center for Analysis, Intelligence and Studies or Tamaulipas), as by its current name, GOPES.

The US Embassy in Mexico City said three of the 12 officers were charged with the murder of migrants “Basic training and / or first-line supervisor training followed” through a State Department program before they were assigned to the Special Corporation.

“These individuals were trained in 2016 and 2017 and they were fully compliant with Leahy verification (of human rights records),” the diplomatic headquarters said.

CAIET was a strangely academic name for what was essentially a SWAT-style police force with a swat response. Like the GOPES, elements often wear masks and armored vehicles.

In 2019, the bodies of the eight people who had been taken from their homes in Nuevo Laredo were later found with gunshot wounds to the head, dressed in camouflage uniforms in the style of drug traffickers and also body armor bearing the initials of the Northeast Cartel. as weapons beside them. Prosecutors eventually concluded that CAIET agents planted the weapons and other equipment on these people before they were executed.

Raymundo Ramos, a human rights activist who investigated and denounced the Nuevo Laredo massacre, stresses that despite those findings, only two of the 40 CAIET members involved in the murders are in custody and charged. Three other officers agreed to testify in exchange for their charges being dismissed, and two more are at large.

The authorities have not dissolved CAIET, they just changed the name to GOPES.

“It is a recurring fact that the (sub) governments change their names only to clean up the image of their police,” Ramos said.

Prosecutors have not stated why GOPES agents they would have decided to kill the migrants, and so far the hearings have not been public.

The migrants were joined by several Mexicans who apparently operated as Armed “protection” for the “dispatch” of smuggled migrants to the US border. The Gulf Cartel obtains much of its income by raising protection from migrant smugglers who cross its territory. He also makes money by kidnapping migrants traveling alone, torturing them until they reveal the phone numbers of their relatives in the United States, and holding them to demand a ransom.

One theory is that GOPES agents opened fire on armed gang members who were on board with the migrants after three assault rifles were found in the burning van. The escorts were shot and then the agents killed the migrants to cover up their mistake.

Prosecutors say the fact that no casings were found at the site of the massacre means that police officers gathered them to hide clues they gave away.

Ramos noted that this coincides with the unit’s tactics. “They don’t normally leave witnesses, it’s part of their training,” he said.

In the 2019 massacre in Nuevo Laredo, the police station left as many as four witnesses in the houses from which the victims were taken, apparently only because four were adolescent women or mothers with children.

The problem isn’t just limited to murders, said Óscar Hernández, an anthropologist at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

“It’s not news that some police companies are lending themselves to this type of practice, not just violence, which is most visible, but others, such as collusion and corruption,” said Hernández.

Mariño, from the business organization, stressed that some state police companies have made it possible to travel safely on the roads in Tamaulipas again, in which bus drivers and passengers were often kidnapped unnoticed.

The GOPES is not the first problem of police abuse in Tamaulipas.

In 2014, the State Police’s “Grupo Hércules”, acting as a sort of paramilitary escort for the mayor of the border town of Matamoros, and Mexican Marines they kidnapped and murdered four people, including three American brothers.

Erica, Alex, and Jose Angel Alvarado Rivera, of Progreso, Texas, disappeared in October 2014 while visiting their father in Control, a small town in Mexico near Matamoros, on the border with Brownsville, Texas. A friend of these people, the Mexican José Guadalupe Castañeda Benítez, was also kidnapped. The bodies of all were found with gunshot wounds to the head more than two weeks later.

Other facets of this year’s massacre remain unclear. For example, Ramos said some of the agents in the case had been arrested They have said they killed the migrants but did not burn the bodies.

An information document from the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) suggests that the Northeast Cartel was active in the area in late January, intent on assassinating a prominent Gulf Cartel figure when he encountered migrants. Some people believe that cartel members of the Northeastern Cartel could have taken part in the massacre, or at least could have set the truck and bodies on fire to undermine the Gulf Cartel’s activities.

There is one point that everyone agrees on: the bodies were so burned that they could never have been identified during the normal examination, and they could have been buried and forgotten as possible participants in another cartel showdown.

However, the GOPES were unaware that the van was part of a larger caravan of vehicles transporting migrants, including a Guatemalan migrant smuggler who knew all the victims. He was the one who informed their families about the massacre in their country of origin, and the relatives made the news public.

“If it wasn’t for the man, they probably would have been buried as another suspect,” Ramos said.

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