Mexican authorities report they found 32 Latino migrants kidnapped over the weekend near the southern US border.
Migrants from Venezuela and Ecuador were travelling on a bus from Monterrey to Matamoros, bordering Texas, when they were detained on Saturday, Public Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodriguez reported.
These kinds of events happened to one or two, three migrants, but this number in this area is atypical, Rodriguez said.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Thursday that a one-year-old girl was among the 32 migrants rescued. Nevertheless, Obrador has been criticised for his lack of attention to crime, allowing criminal groups to seize new territory and consolidate power. The country has seen several cases of extreme violence in the past month, including 11 young people shot dead during a militant attack on a party and 14 people killed during a farmers’ uprising against a criminal group that was extorting them.
Meanwhile, a record number of migrants are travelling through Central America and Mexico to the US border, making it a major issue in November’s US elections and a major concern for President Joe Biden. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior officials met with Lopez Obrador in Mexico City last week. Additionally, US authorities reported that in December, more than 9,600 migrants were encountered at the southern US border in an average of seven days. The seven-day average recorded on 28 November, for instance, was about 6,800 encounters.
Mexicans have been suffering for decades at the hands of organised crime groups, often in collusion with local and national security forces and politicians. More than 400,000 people have been killed since the murder rate began to rise in 2008 amid a crackdown on drug cartels, data from the statistics agency INEGI show. More than 113,000 people are missing, according to a government database.
Glady Cañas, head of the non-profit organisation Ayudandoles a Triunfar, said migrants are blinded by the hope offered by video and voice messages from migrants who have passed through US immigration authorities and been released into American communities, “but they are not sharing the reality…”
The federal government has closed ports of entry in several states and reallocated personnel to transport and process migrants. Moreover, since May, the US Department of Homeland Security has deported or returned more than 445,000 migrants – the vast majority of whom have crossed the southern US border, the agency said.
