Mexico City — As many as 50 people are missing after setting out on three-hour car trips this year between Mexico’s industrial hub of Monterrey and the border city of Nuevo Laredo on a well-traveled stretch of road local media have dubbed “the highway of death.”
Relatives say family members simply vanished. The
disappearances, and last week’s shooting of 15 apparently innocent bystanders
in Reynosa, suggest Mexico is returning to the dark days of the 2006-2012 drug
war when cartel gunmen often targeted the general public as well as one
another.
“It’s no
longer between the cartels; they are attacking the public,” said activist
Angelica Orozco.
As many
as half a dozen of those who disappeared on the highway are believed to be U.S.
citizens or residents, though the U.S. Embassy could not confirm their status. One,
José de Jesús Gómez from Irving, Texas, reportedly disappeared on the highway
on June 3.
On Saturday,
the FBI office in San Antonio, Texas, issued a bulletin seeking information on
the disappearance of a Laredo, Texas, woman, Gladys Perez Sánchez, and her
16-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter, who were last seen setting out on the
highway June 13. They had visited relatives in Sabinas Hidalgo, a town
on the highway, and were returning to Texas when they vanished.
Most of
the victims are believed to have disappeared approaching or leaving the
cartel-dominated city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas. About
a half-dozen men have reappeared alive, badly beaten, and all they will say is
that armed men forced them to stop on the highway and took their vehicles.
What
happened to the rest remains a mystery. Most were residents of Nuevo
Leon state, where Monterrey is located. Desperate for answers, relatives of the
missing took to the streets in Monterrey on Thursday to protest, demanding
answers.
Orozco,
a member of the civic group United Forces for Our Disappeared, said the
abductions seem to mark a return to the worst days of Mexico’s drug war, like
in 2011 when cartel gunmen in the neighboring state of Tamaulipas dragged
innocent passengers off buses and forced them to fight each other to the death
with sledgehammers.
Then, as
now, politicians and prosecutors have given the families of the disappeared few
answers.
“Now,
more than 10 years after the disappearances in 2010 and 2011, they cannot
continue to use the same pretexts,” said Orozco. But “they’re using the
same lines. … In the last decade they were supposed to have created
institutions and procedures, but it’s the same old story of authorities doing
nothing.”
United
Forces for Our Disappeared sent out a press statement on May 19 warning people
about the dangers on the Monterrey-Nuevo Laredo highway, even though by mid-May
the group had received only about 10 reports of people disappearing there. More
reports poured in in June, and now amount to about 50.
The
government of Nuevo Leon state acknowledged 10 days later that it had received
reports of 14 people who had disappeared on the highway so far in 2021, along
with five more in neighboring Tamaulipas, where Nuevo Laredo is located.
But
Nuevo Leon didn’t warn people against traveling on the highway until almost a
month later on June 23.
That was
too late for Gómez, and for Javier Toto Cagal, a 36-year-old truck driver and
father of five who disappeared along with three employees of the same trucking
company on the 135-mile (220 km) stretch of highway on June 3.
They were driving to Nuevo Laredo in a car.
“Up to
now, we don’t know anything about (what happened to) them,” said Erma Fiscal
Jara, Toto Cagal’s wife. “It wasn’t until June 5 that the company called
me to say ‘your husband has disappeared.’ As far as the authorities, I ask and
they say ‘we don’t know anything.’”
Even
after acknowledging the abductions, the Nuevo Leon state government suggested
it was Tamaulipas’ problem. The Nuevo Leon government also gave
confusing information, first claiming to have rescued 17 people after
abductions on the highway, then later acknowledging those victims had made it
home on their own.
It
wasn’t until Friday that both state governments announced a joint program to
increase policing and security on the highway, a step that, if it had been
carried out a month earlier, might have saved dozens of lives.
“Only
now is the National Guard going out to patrol the highway. Why did they
wait so long?” asked Karla Moreno, whose husband, truck driver Artemio Moreno,
disappeared on the road April 13.
She,
too, is horrified that northern Mexico is reliving the experiences of a decade
ago. “How can this be happening? We were supposed to have more (law
enforcement) resources by now,” she said.
Nuevo
Laredo has long been dominated by the Northeast Cartel, a remnant of the old Zetas
cartel, whose members were infamous for their violence.
Mexico
security analyst Alejandro Hope said the highway disappearances and the June 19
events in Reynosa — when gunmen from rival cartels drove through the streets,
randomly killing 15 passersby — were reminiscent of the attacks on civilians
during the 2006-2012 drug war.
In 2008,
a drug cartel in the western city of Morelia tossed hand grenades into a crowd
during an Independence Day celebration. In 2011, cartel gunmen in
Tamaulipas abducted dozens of men from passenger buses and made them fight each
other to the death, either as a recruitment tool or for entertainment.
“It is
something that happens episodically; it never completely stopped,”
Hope said of the attacks on civilians. The only thing
that has changed, Hope said, was the rhetoric.
Officials
in the early 2000s were often quick to repeat an old belief that drug cartels
only killed each other, not innocent civilians. This time around, both
in the Reynosa killings and highway abductions, officials quickly acknowledged
the victims appeared to be innocent civilians.
“That argument, that ‘they only kill each other’ isn’t
heard so much anymore,” Hope said.
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/world/disappearances-rise-on-mexicos-highway-of-death-to-border/
***MARK
STEVENSON
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