Two kidnapped Americans in Mexico are found murdered
Four American citizens are missing after being kidnapped. The Americans came under fire after crossing the border from Texas into Matamoros.
Two of the four Americans kidnapped in northern Mexico last week were found dead Tuesday, officials said, in a case that sharpened US focus on cross-border insecurity and the ease with which armed groups operate just meters from the border.
On Friday, four South Carolina friends crossed from Brownsville, Texas, to the border town of Matamoros, where one of them planned to undergo plastic surgery. Their white minivan came under fire almost immediately. Armed men in body armor and rifles forced or dragged them into a white pickup truck, a gruesome scene that was filmed by a bystander.
In the days that followed, the victims were moved among at least three different locations by cartel members, said the governor of Tamaulipas state, Américo Villarreal.
By the time Mexican security forces located a "log house" on the outskirts of town on Tuesday morning, two Americans had been killed and another wounded. The survivors were taken back to the border. Mexican media showed pictures of what appeared to be a man and woman receiving treatment in an ambulance.
In a country that averages more than 80 murders a day and where news of murders and disappearances rarely makes the front pages, kidnappings and search-and-discover Americans have dominated Mexican media coverage.
The Biden administration, which usually does not comment on insecurity in Mexico when it is not explicitly related to drug trafficking, prompted immediate concern, calling the crime "unacceptable" as have the FBI, State Department, Department of Homeland Security and others. The agencies worked with their Mexican counterparts to find the victims.
Organized crime groups in Mexico do not typically target US citizens; They want to avoid angering the US government. While it is unclear how the events might affect US security strategy, Mexico will now come under pressure to show its effort to suppress the groups involved. One suspect has been arrested.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said his government will be thorough in its investigation of the kidnapping and killings. But he also expressed frustration at the level of attention the events have attracted, saying media outlets “are silent like mummies” when Mexicans are murdered in the United States.
There is no clear explanation as to why unarmed Americans who authorities said had no apparent drug-trafficking connections were targeted by organized criminals in Mexico. Michelle Williams, the wife of one of the survivors, said the FBI told her the four friends, all black, were mistaken for Haiti. Migrants are frequently kidnapped for ransom in Matamoros.
“I was glad that my husband was coming home, but I want to send condolences to the other family members who aren’t coming home,” Williams, the wife of Eric James Williams of Lake City, S.C., told The Washington Post.
Michele Williams said her husband, Latavia “Tay” McGee, McGee’s cousin Shaeed Woodard and friend Zindell Brown had traveled to Mexico because McGee was getting a tummy tuck.
Eric James Williams of Lake City, S.C., and three others were abducted and shot at by unknown assailants in Mexico last week. He is one of the two who survived, and he returned to the United States on Tuesday. (Michele Williams)
The trip came together quickly, Williams said. Her husband, who is “willing to help anybody,” drove the rented Chrysler Pacifica.
Matamoros is controlled by factions of the Gulf cartel, whose consolidation of power there has generally improved security. (The most violent places in Mexico are typically those where multiple groups are battling for territory.)
Americans in Brownsville, who stopped crossing the border when violence escalated in Matamoros around 2009, have begun returning for medical appointments, cheaper medication or lunch. In January, Texas Monthly published a list of the best taco restaurants in the city.
But signs of the cartel's presence remained. In 2021, 37 migrants were kidnapped for 15 days on the outskirts of Matamoros. Last year, Mexican authorities stopped exhuming bodies from a secret mass grave after cartel members threatened them.
On Tuesday, Tamaulipas Attorney General Irving Barrios Mujica said the victims were rescued in an area where the Gulf Cartel operates. He said he believed the kidnapping was the product of "confusion" rather than a targeted attack.
The most infamous recent massacre of Americans in Mexico came in November 2019, when nine women and children from a small American Mormon community in the northern state of Sonora were shot dead while traveling along a desert highway in three cars. The attack, which investigators believe may have been a mistaken identity, prompted calls in mostly conservative US political circles for US troops to be sent to Mexico.
President Donald Trump tweeted at the time: "Cartels have become so big and powerful that sometimes you need an army to defeat an army."
Republicans have now revived that talking point. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) tweeted on Tuesday: “It is time to allow the use of military force against the cartels.”
Villareal, the governor of Tamaulipas, said local authorities have detained a 24-year-old man suspected of being responsible for guarding the victims.
López Obrador said there would be "no impunity" for the perpetrators. He said Mexican authorities "work and cooperate" with their counterparts in the United States in a "respectful" manner but that his government would not allow "foreign countries" to meddle in national issues.
Biden administration officials said they have focused on the health and well-being of survivors, supporting families of those killed, and bringing perpetrators to justice. They did not publicly name the victims.
"We will do everything we can to identify, find and hold to account the individuals responsible for this attack on American citizens," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
Videos and photographs from the kidnapping verified by The Post show armed men forcing a woman into the back of a white van and dragging three other people out. They leave a trail of what appears to be blood on the ground.
A fifth person can be seen lying on the sidewalk, apparently injured. The US ambassador to Mexico said in a statement that an "innocent Mexican citizen" was killed in the encounter.
A Mexican official said the Americans were found Tuesday morning in the village of Tecolote, about 15 miles from Matamoros. Barrios Mujica said they were found during a "joint search". Mexican officials said the United States provided the intelligence.
The FBI offered a $50,000 reward for the return of the victims and the arrest of those responsible.
"It's like a bad dream you wish you could wake up from," Zendel's sister, Zalandrea Brown, told The Associated Press before the deaths were announced.
Kristina Hickson, the 28-year-old mother of Zindel Brown, told WPDE of ABC affiliate in Myrtle Beach, S.
I immediately knew it was him," she said. "I was able to follow each one as they were going to be put on the truck."
Zalandria Brown said, "To see someone in your family get thrown into the back of a truck and dragged away is just unbelievable."
McGee's mother said she hasn't 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 sending voicemail," said Barbara Burgess.
Matamoros, home to 580,000 people, is the second largest city in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, across the Rio Grande from Texas. It is one of six Mexican states the State Department has advised Americans not to travel to, citing the risk of crime and kidnapping.
Kidnappings of American citizens in Tamaulipas are rare, but immigrants are frequently kidnapped.
New York-based Human Rights First has recorded more than 8,700 reports of kidnappings and other violent attacks against migrants and asylum seekers who have been expelled or stuck in Mexican border towns while they wait to present their cases in US courts.
Some Mexicans have taken to social media to compare the attention given to kidnapped Americans and the quick and effective resolution by authorities to their relative inaction when Mexicans or immigrants go missing.
"What do we need to do so that the kidnappings and disappearances in Mexico are investigated as quickly as the (fortunately) case of the four Americans who were arrested?" asked Pascal Beltrán del Rio, managing editor of the national newspaper Excélsior.
At the height of the US-backed drug war in Mexico more than a decade ago, a series of massacres of immigrants in the city of San Fernando, about 85 miles south of Matamoros, highlighted the brutality of gang violence and the vulnerability of immigrants.
In 2010, authorities discovered the bodies of 72 Central American immigrants killed by the Zetas, a ruthless group that had broken off from the Gulf Cartel. The following year, gunmen took at least 193 people off buses, clubbed them to death, and dumped their bodies in dozens of secret graves.
