MEXICO CITY — Two of the four Americans who were kidnapped in a Mexican border city last week have been found dead, Mexican officials said Tuesday morning. The other two were rescued and returned to the United States; a suspect was in custody.
“Approximately one hour ago we confirmed that the four Americans were located,” Gov. Américo Villarreal of Tamaulipas state said in a phone call during President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s daily news conference.
“Thirty-five minutes ago we got confirmation from the prosecutor’s office that of the four people, two were found dead, one wounded and one alive,” Villarreal said. “Ambulances are rushing to the area to recover them and offer them medical care.”
Mexican media showed images of what appeared to be a man and a woman receiving treatment in an ambulance. Later Tuesday, the attorney general of Tamaulipas, Irving Barrios Mojica, said two Americans had been returned to the United States at an international bridge with staff from the U.S. Consulate in Matamoros present.
A Mexican official said the Americans were found in the village of Tecolote, about 15 miles from the border city of Matamoros, the site of the kidnapping Friday. Barrios Mojica, said they were found during a “joint search.” Mexican officials said the United States had provided intelligence.
Mexican security secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said Tuesday a suspect had been detained but offered no further details.
López Obrador said there would be “no impunity” for the perpetrators. He said Mexican authorities were “working and cooperating” with their U.S. counterparts in a “respectful” manner but that his government would not allow “foreign countries” to intervene in national issues.
“We don’t meddle to try to see what U.S. criminal gangs distribute fentanyl in the United States,” he said.
Officials did not immediately name the victims. The Americans have been identified by family members as three friends who were accompanying a fourth who planned to undergo a medical procedure in Mexico.
Latavia “Tay” McGee, her cousin Shaeed Woodard and friends Zindell Brown and Eric James Williams, traveling in a minivan with North Carolina plates, had reportedly just crossed over the border from Brownsville, Tex., to Matamoros when they were fired on and abducted by unidentified assailants.
The FBI offered a $50,000 reward for their return and the arrest of those responsible.
“This is like a bad dream you wish you could wake up from,” Zalandria Brown told the Associated Press before the deaths were announced. She identified one of the kidnap victims as her younger brother, Zindell Brown, of Myrtle Beach, S.C.
One member of the group had intended to undergo the cosmetic medical procedure known as a tummy tuck, Zalandria Brown said.
To avoid drawing the ire of the U.S. government, Mexico’s organized crime groups do not ordinarily target U.S. citizens. While it is unclear whether the killings will change U.S. security strategy, Mexico will come under pressure to demonstrate an effort to crack down on the groups involved in the kidnapping.
That is not an easy task in a city such as Matamoros, where the Zeta cartel controls significant territory and has enough manpower and firearms to challenge Mexican security forces.
Video and photographs from the scene verified by The Washington Post show armed men wearing protective vests forcing a woman into the back of a white pickup and dragging three other people to the truck, with a trail of what appears to be blood on the ground. A fifth person can be seen lying on the sidewalk, apparently injured. The U.S. ambassador to Mexico said in a statement that “an innocent Mexican citizen” was killed in the confrontation.
Christina Hickson, the mother of 28-year-old Zindell Brown, told ABC affiliate WPDE in Myrtle Beach that she identified her son from footage of the kidnapping shared online.
“I was able to follow each one as they would be placed on the truck,” she said. “I knew immediately that was him.”
Zalandria Brown said, “To see a member of your family thrown in the back of a truck and dragged, it is just unbelievable.”
McGee was traveling to Mexico from South Carolina for a medical procedure, her mother, Barbara Burgess, 54, told ABC News. Burgess said she had not spoken to her daughter since Friday, when McGee called and said she was 15 minutes away from the doctor’s office.
“Her phone just started going to voice mail,” Burgess said.
Rita Darby, an aunt of Woodard, told The Post that he was traveling in Tamaulipas when he was abducted. She said he worked at a fast-food restaurant in Myrtle Beach. She did not have further information about what had happened to him or McGee.
López Obrador did not mention a medical procedure Monday when he spoke of the kidnapping.
“The information we have is that they crossed the border to buy medicines in Mexico,” the president told reporters. “There was a confrontation between groups and they were detained.”
Matamoros, home to 580,000 people, is the second-largest city in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas and is across from Texas’s southern tip. Tamaulipas is one of six Mexican states to which the State Department advises Americans against traveling, citing the risk of crime and kidnapping.
While kidnappings of American citizens in Tamaulipas are rare, the state has a long history of drug-related violence, in which criminal groups and drug gangs routinely fight turf wars and target migrants for kidnapping and extortion.
Since the beginning of 2021, Human Rights First, an international human rights organization, tracked over 8,705 reports of kidnappings and other violent attacks against migrants and asylum seekers expelled to or stuck in Mexican border cities waiting to present their cases in U.S courts.
Over a decade ago, at the height of the U.S.-backed drug war, a series of migrant massacres in the city of San Fernando, roughly 85 miles south of Matamoros, stunned the world as it underscored the barbarity of cartel violence and the vulnerability of migrants.
In 2010, authorities discovered the bodies of 72 migrants from Central America who had been killed by the Zetas, a ruthless group that broke from the Gulf drug cartel. The following year, authorities found that gunmen had taken least 193 people off buses, bludgeoned them to death and dumped their bodies in dozens of clandestine graves.
An earlier version of this article misidentified Rosa Icela Rodríguez as the security secretary of Tamaulipas state. She is the federal security secretary of all Mexico. The article has been corrected.
Samuel Oakford contributed to this report.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiWmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS93b3JsZC8yMDIzLzAzLzA3L21leGljby1hbWVyaWNhbnMta2lkbmFwLW1hdGFtb3Jvcy1tZWRpY2FsL9IBAA?oc=5
2023-03-07 17:57:00Z
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