by Mexican authorities said Wednesday that all 31 migrants captured over the weekend in a mass kidnapping near the U.S. border had been rescued.
The announcement came after days of frantic search for the migrants, involving Army and National Guard troops, police forces, search and rescue dogs, and cell phone signal tracking. The kidnapping, which took place on Saturday night, came amid an escalating kidnapping crisis in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
Both the presidential spokesperson and the Secretary of the Interior confirmed the rescue of the migrants, who came from Venezuela, Honduras, Ecuador and Colombia, in addition to Mexico.
The episode highlighted how the current surge in migration to the United States is transforming parts of northern Mexico into a minefield for asylum seekers and migrants from around the world.
Tens of thousands of people have arrived in the border region, where they are encouraged to use a U.S. Customs and Border Protection app to present themselves at a legal border crossing to enter the United States.
But while immigrants bide their time, cartels take advantage of kidnapping opportunities to demand ransom.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico said Wednesday that authorities had managed to reduce kidnappings across the country, but acknowledged that migrant kidnapping groups were especially active in Tamaulipas and other states, including San Luis Potosí, Nuevo León and Coahuila. .
Mexico’s security secretary, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, said Wednesday that the latest case in Tamaulipas had also drawn attention given the number of people attacked. “This type of event occurred with one, two, three migrants,” she Rodríguez said, “but this number in this area is atypical.”
The mass kidnapping in Tamaulipas on Saturday night is one of the largest cases of its kind since last May, when nearly 50 immigrants, including 11 children, were kidnapped. kidnaped from a bus in the central state of San Luis Potosí. Authorities mobilized 650 police and army troops to search for the migrants, all of whom were found in an area where another mass kidnapping occurred a month earlier.
In Tamaulipas, the kidnapping of migrants is becoming a reliable source of income for criminal groups active in the border region, including the Gulf Cartel and the Northeast Cartel.
Jorge Cuéllar, security spokesman for the state of Tamaulipas, confirmed in a telephone interview that another bus, traveling to Matamoros, was attacked on Monday in another incident. Five of his passengers, all Venezuelans who were detained in a white car, were later rescued by National Guard agents.
The kidnappings occurred even as Mexican authorities sought to beef up security along the border in late December, when families on both sides of the border typically gather to celebrate the holidays.
López Obrador told reporters that specific details about the investigation into the kidnapping of the 31 migrants were being withheld because “a certain secrecy is required.”
The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, saying that four of the kidnapped migrants were Colombian citizens and that the Colombian embassy in Mexico was working with Mexican authorities to obtain their release.
Organizations that focus on the immigration crisis at the border said the case reflected difficulties in changing U.S. policies toward immigrants.
“Organized crime has been able to use migration as a business precisely because many migrants and asylum seekers do not have a legal path available,” said Stephanie Brewer, Mexico director for the Washington Office on Latin America.
The result, he said, was that migrants and asylum seekers make the journey north on their own or pay an organized crime group to cross the border. But just as migrant smuggling has become a lucrative business, so has migrant kidnapping.
“So they kidnap the immigrants, either because they were trying to travel with a rival group or pay a rival group, maybe the immigrants had not paid any group for the ticket or it is simply an economic proposal so that their relatives can be extorted to make a profit,” Ms. Brewer said. “And that’s a model that’s been in place for many years.”
After a pandemic-era border rule led to the expulsion of many migrants from the United States to Mexico, the advocacy group Human Rights First tracked at least 13,480 reports of kidnappings, murders, torture, rape and other violent attacks against migrants and asylum seekers.
Although the rule, known as Title 42, ended last year, immigration policies that keep people in limbo in northern Mexico have made them easy prey for organized crime groups, added Brewer, who recently traveled to the Arizona-Mexico border, where he found dozens of people waiting to get appointments with border officials.
“This example of mass kidnapping should be a wake-up call to end policies that bog down thousands of people on the Mexican side of the border,” he said, “or force them into the hands of organized criminal groups to search for a route to the United States.”
