Fifty migrants and two drivers disappeared Tuesday near Nuevo León, where they were traveling from San Luis Potosí, on a bus found abandoned in the northern state’s Galeana municipality. After the discovery of the EvaTours vehicle, the authorities of both countries launched an investigation that has so far led to the whereabouts of nine of the kidnapped foreigners from Venezuela and Honduras. The men, aged between 18 and 35, were at kilometer 73 on the Matehuala-Saltillo highway, where they were rescued by plainclothes police officers.
Nuevo León Minister of Security Gerardo Palacios confirmed on Tuesday afternoon the discovery of several missing people, all safe, who in turn confirmed the place of events and claimed that they managed to escape their captors in San Luis Potosí until after Nuevo Leon. “The National Guard bases its statement on satellite tracking, which provides irrefutable data,” he said of the location of the vehicle and migrants. According to the testimonies collected, the rescued people were being held captive at an address in Doctor Arroyo, in the state of Nuevo León, as indicated by the San Luis Potosí Attorney General’s Office.
The agency also said it was combing the stretch of road bordering the northern state where the bus allegedly went missing. And he has asked for the support of the Federal Institute for Migration “so that migrants entering the country with a transit permit can be accompanied on their journey through Mexico.”
President López Obrador drew attention to the event this Wednesday during his daily morning conference. “We are working on that. We can’t say more for obvious reasons, but it’s being worked on,” he said. “Unfortunately, there seem to be gangs who kidnap for this reason. [hacemos] the appeal to the migrant brothers not to allow themselves to be deceived and manipulated by the traffickers, the coyotes, the smugglers,” he concluded.
This is the second kidnapping and ransom demand in the Matehuala area in just a month and a half. On April 6, police located 35 missing migrants between San Luis Potosí and Guanajuato. At the time, 23 of those rescued had hired a van, the trail of which was lost on the outskirts of where they were found, in circumstances very similar to those now reported. A month later, on May 5, the kidnapping of a group of Colombian migrants en route to the United States was reported in Sonora, who were rescued shortly thereafter.
These are the latest episodes in a relentless trickle that has worsened over the past year, particularly in the northern country border area. The pressure cooker that embodies de facto migration management reached its peak in late March with the fire at a center of the National Institute of Migration in Ciudad Juárez that killed 40 migrants and for which Commissioner Francisco Garduño is on trial. But it is a crisis that is not about to end anytime soon.
Just a week ago, the United States put an end to the controversial Title 42, a health regulation restored by Donald Trump under the guise of the Covid pandemic that allowed migrants who had crossed the dividing line to be brought back hot. Since the closure, US authorities have reinforced the more than 3,000-kilometer border with 24,000 agents and Mexico has temporarily closed 33 immigration stopovers awaiting the National Human Rights Commission to review its terms. These shelters housed more than 1,300 people. The sum of these factors has exacerbated an already tragic situation in which the vulnerability of migrants serves as the perfect breeding ground for mafias to exploit them.
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