At least 31 migrants traveling by bus in northern Mexico heading to the border with the United States were kidnapped on Saturday by armed men, as revealed in the last few hours by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
“It is known that it is a truck with 30 or 31 migrants who were unloaded, they left five, they took the other migrants, but the search is already being carried out since the beginning,” AMLO explained in statements to the media. The five travelers who were not taken by the kidnappers are Mexican nationals.
Jorge Cuéllar, security spokesperson for the border state of Tamaulipas, said in statements to Milenio TV reported by AFP that the authorities received "a report from the driver of a Grupo Senda bus in which he told us that it had been intercepted by five vehicles" driven by armed men and took away "31 of the 36" passengers. The spokesman added that those kidnapped "are foreigners." Later, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, said on the social network X that four of the kidnapped people are from his country.
En este secuestro múltiple en Mexico hay 4 colombianos. La embajada colombiana en México coordina con el estado mexicano el rescate sanos y salvos. https://t.co/BzlO3FpuO5
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) January 3, 2024
The bus left Monterrey, in the state of Nuevo León, and had the border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, as its final destination from where the migrants try to cross into the United States. They were intercepted when they were near the municipality of Reynosa, another border city.
Illegal immigration, dominated by cartels
This is a new criminal act in one of the most dangerous land migration routes in the world. The US-Mexico border was the "most dangerous land migration route in the world" in 2022, with 686 dead or missing, according to a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published in September.
Nearly half (307) of those deaths on the US-Mexico border were linked to dangerous crossings of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts. To add to the intrinsic danger of the journey to the United States, whose numbers reached record figures last year, is the presence of the Mexican drug cartels, which control these migration movements to introduce their merchandise into the country.
