As the truck, carrying North Carolina license plates, crossed the border from Brownsville, Texas, to Matamoros, Mexico, on Friday, so-called hawks patrolling the border area alerted their chiefs to the presence of four Americans.
The gunmen, who were not identified or linked to any of the cartels operating in the area, opened fire on the car. In the salvo, a 33-year-old Mexican woman was killed by a stray bullet more than a block away. Immediately afterwards, the occupants of the vehicle were kidnapped.
A version of the tragedy circulated by Mexican authorities says the gunmen were part of one of seven cartels fighting over the Mexican border town, and that the four were smuggling in Americans – who crossed the border for a medical procedure of Haitian origin was a mistake. and decided to confront them to mark their territory. In Matamoros, a city of just over 500,000 inhabitants, there is a life and death struggle between the cartels: the Zetas, Jalisco New Generation, El Golfo, La Familia Michoacana, Sinaloa, Juárez and the Northeast.
A video That has been widely shared on social media and shows several heavily armed people putting the victims in the back of a van in broad daylight in front of dozens of motorists. The footage shows semi-paralyzed drivers aware that a massacre could happen at any moment, an outcome Mexicans have faced since the state declared war during the term of President Felipe Calderón, who ruled from 2006 to 2012. against the drug trade.
“From this town [Matamoros] the drugs will be distributed in the central and eastern United States,” said Jesús Lemus Barajas, a drug trafficking specialist in Mexico and a contributor in Spanish to the Times and Los Angeles Times. “It’s not for nothing that the US State Department has issued a ‘Level 4: Do Not Travel’ warning to US citizens about crime and kidnapping.”
The rescue operation, conducted by Mexican authorities, found Latvian “Tay” McGee, mother of six, and Eric James Williams alive with a gunshot wound to the left leg. Two other victims, identified as Shaeed Woodard and Zindell Brown, were found dead in a house on the outskirts of Matamoros after being taken from the white Chrysler Pacifica minibus and held for three days, Tamaulipas governor Américo Villarreal said. Mexican authorities arrested a suspect, identified as 24-year-old José Guadalupe N., who they say was watching the house.
The abductions and deaths of American citizens have rocked the highest political circles in both countries. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean Pierre immediately expressed outrage, saying that “attacks like this are unacceptable,” but tempered it by saying that “The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State are working with Mexican authorities to to bring those responsible to justice.”
“President Biden’s position is becoming increasingly difficult,” said Armando Guzmán, a Washington correspondent for numerous Mexican publications. “The election process is just around the corner and pressure is mounting from the most conservative sectors of the Republican Party,” he accuses [the Biden administration] “Not doing enough to stem the tide of deaths from fentanyl and other opioids,” which claimed nearly 109,000 lives between February 2021 and February 2022, he said.
The statement by US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar was moderate, but left open that the need for a bilateral approach to the fight against the cartels, prompted by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policy to control the presence and functions of US drugs limit, hindered enforcement. Administrative Agents in Mexico.
It’s no better on the Mexican side. In a country where 93 out of 100 murders go unpunished, the speed with which bodies were found and a suspected kidnapper apprehended has sparked all sorts of reactions on social and news media. Ciro Gómez Leyva said on his popular national radio show, “If Mexican authorities did everything they could to locate the four Americans in Matamoros, how many fewer dead and missing would we have in the country?”
Faced with the growing need to get results in his fight against insecurity and many doubts about the effectiveness of his “hugs, not bullets” policy, López Obrador rejected the idea that what happened in Matamoros was another example of violence related to with drugs. the lives of 137,603 people in December 2022.
In his daily morning press conference, the president criticized what he called “exaggerated” media coverage of the Matamoros case.
“All media in the United States treat information in a sensational way; not so when Mexicans are killed in the United States, they are silent like mummies,” López Obrador said. “It is clear that we regret what is happening in our country and this event in particular and we offer our deepest condolences.”
And he recalls the case of two day laborers from Oaxaca reportedly shot dead by a colleague in January at a mushroom farm in Half Moon Bay, about 30 miles south of San Francisco, among seven migrant workers, “but nothing came of it either in the US press, López Obrador said – though the case dominated US news for days.
The Mexican president indicated that US authorities should focus more on US drug demand than on Mexican cartel suppliers. “Are there no networks [in the U.S.]? Are there no cartels? Who sells the drug? This is a matter for the US authorities.”
He said President Biden has reiterated that Mexico’s sovereignty will be respected. “It’s appreciated, but we don’t allow interventionism,” he said in a clear message to Republican officials demanding that the Mexican cartels be classified as terrorist organizations, which would allow US troops to intervene.
Adán Augusto López Hernández, Mexico’s interior minister, said the attack on the Americans in Matamoros was regrettable, “but it doesn’t have to break friendly, commercial and economic ties with the United States.”
The official, considered one of López Obrador’s staunchest allies, has fought back against the president’s critics.
“Areas previously held by organized crime are being recaptured,” said López Hernández. “There’s been a drop in crime rates, kidnappings are down about 68%.”
Such commitments have failed to quell American criticism. Senator Lindsey Graham (RS.C.) spoke to Fox News’ Jesse Watters on Monday urging the United States to “get tough” on Mexico after the kidnapping and supported former Atty. General William Barr’s recent proposal to classify drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
“I’m going to take Bill Barr’s advice and hit Mexico hard,” said Graham. “It’s not just about the hostages… I’ll do everything I can to get them back. I would do what Trump did. I’ll warn Mexico.”
“If you continue to provide a safe haven for fentanyl drug traffickers, you are an enemy of the United States,” Graham said. “I will pass legislation to make certain Mexican drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations under U.S. law and pave the way for the use of military force if necessary to protect the United States from being poisoned by Mexican-origin materials.”
For his part, in an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal this week, Barr López described Obrador as “the main facilitator of the cartels.”
“These narco-terrorist groups are more like ISIS than the American mafia,” Barr wrote, referring to the Islamic State terror group. “Case-by-case prosecutions can be part of an overall effort, but the only way to defeat them is to use all the resources we have in Mexico. Simply labeling the cartels as terrorist groups will in itself accomplish nothing. The real question is whether we are willing to go after them as a terrorist group.”
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican who introduced an initiative in January that would allow the U.S. military to crack down on Mexican criminal organizations, tweeted, “It’s time to allow military force against them,” and appealed to López Obrador, the initiative to classify the cartels as terrorist organizations.
“Are you listening, Lopez Obrador? We would like to have you as a partner. Help us help you,” Crenshaw said.
This is not the first time the issue of classifying drug cartels as terrorist organizations has come up. It surfaced in June 2008 when a Zetas cartel cell detonated a car bomb in Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo, Texas. In January, after a group of inmates escaped from a prison in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, across the street from El Paso, some US lawmakers called for drug traffickers to be classified as terrorists.
“With elections in the United States already approaching, it is very likely that the Mexico issue will continue to make headlines after politicians in the United States use it as a recurring theme to win votes,” said Guzman, the journalist. “Former President Trump has shown that the issue is highly profitable politically.”
Source: LA Times
Roger Stone is an author and opinion journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He is known for his controversial and thought-provoking views on a variety of topics, and has a talent for engaging readers with his writing.
