East of Matamoros, before reaching the coast, there is a vast network of dunes, lagoons and scrubland, hardly interrupted by a few houses and ranches. You are mile after mile of nothing, the perfect place to hide, to do what cannot be seen. For years, criminals used a property there called La Bartolina to dispose of bodies. The four American tourists who were kidnapped in the city last Friday also turned up there.
It was the bittersweet ending to a story that threatened to turn into a major diplomatic crisis. The incident came at a critical time for relations between Mexico and the United States. The Republican Party, which has made managing the immigration crisis one of the thrown weapons against the management of the Joe Biden administration, has proposed legislation that would allow the military to fight organized crime south of the border. Meanwhile, several border states are pushing to label drug cartels as terrorist groups.
In the Matamoros case, the FBI offered rewards for data to help locate her. The White House had described the situation as “unacceptable”. Unlike other cases, the speed of the authorities was providential, so the outcome was no worse. Of the four, two have been found dead, two men, Shaeed Woodard and Zindell Brown. A third, Eric Williams, sustained a gunshot wound to the leg. The fourth, Latavia “Tay” McGee, was in excellent health apart from the fright she must have been experiencing in those days.
Paramedics attend to Eric Williams with a gunshot wound to the leg on March 7, 2023.Str (Str)
Tamaulipas District Attorney Irving Barrios has reported that the main line of investigation points to “confusion,” though he gave no further details. Did the criminals mistake the four friends for a group of Haitian drug dealers, as some US media speculated these days? Barrios didn’t say anything. When asked about the criminal group that might be behind the kidnapping, the prosecutor said Matamoros was historically the stronghold of the Gulf Cartel. The following lines describe what happened during those four days, based on information compiled by the Tamaulipas Attorney’s Office and US government officials and quoted by that country’s media.
3 March
The friends had left Lake City, South Carolina. The idea was that they would take turns at the wheel of the Chrysler Pacifica with a North Carolina license plate. Aboard the minivan were Woodard, Brown, Williams and 33-year-old Tay McGee. The group of friends were close, according to Zalandria Brown, a neighbor and sister of Brown, one of the two Americans killed, from Florence, South Carolina. Between Lake City, the city of 6,000 people they set out from, and Matamoros is about 2,300 kilometers and the travelers crossed four states (Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas) before crossing the border at Brownsville.
At 9:18 a.m. on Friday, the Chrysler Pacifica reached the border. He drove to Matamoros via the Puente Viejo in the Moderna district, the northernmost part of the Mexican city. Due to the poor phone signal, relatives have lost contact with them since crossing. According to US authorities, the friends got lost looking for the doctor’s office where they allegedly had an appointment. The woman was scheduled to undergo a tummy tuck, a cosmetic surgery. Both Zalandria Brown and McGee’s mother have told US media that they have advised the group of four against travel. McGee is a mother of six children.
The four circled Matamoros for a while. McGee had traveled to Mexico for medical reasons years ago and had had no problems. Before 11:00 a.m., public surveillance cameras located them on one of the main thoroughfares, Cavazos Lerma Boulevard. La Pacífica appears on other cameras until, at 11:00 a.m., the video surveillance system detects that they are followed by a gray Volkswagen Jetta. Over the next 45 minutes, up to eight different vehicles participate in the pursuit, interception, and hijacking.
Among the vehicles involved are a black Suburban, two black and one gold Silverado, a white Aveo and the famous white GMC Sierra. In the latter case, the criminals forced the four to go upstairs after intercepting them, a scene recorded in a video shared on social networks the same Friday. According to the Tamaulipas prosecutor’s office, the attackers initially took the group of friends away but tried to escape. Then they were shot.
The videos that would be circulating on Friday show this last moment, already after the shooting, when the criminals loaded the friends into the Sierra Blanca raft and took them from Avenida Lauro Villar and Calle Primera, very close to the center. took away When authorities arrived, they found three dollars in cash in the car, several bank cards and memberships to various institutions, and some receipts. Apparently, it was medical evidence, which allowed investigators to refine the possible identities of the victims.
4th of March
Nothing moved too much on Friday. Not even on Saturday. The nationality of the abductees was not yet known. In fact, there wasn’t even talk of a kidnapping in Mexico. In a country with more than 100,000 missing persons, the fact that a group of armed men takes away one or more people does not necessarily have to do with obtaining a ransom.
Tamaulipas authorities contacted the heads of the US consulate in Matamoros. At the same time, prosecutors visited various clinics and hospitals around the city to see if they had found any of the four. The logic was impeccable: in the videos from the day before, you can see the criminals treating some of the unconscious bodies like sacks of grain. The researchers were unlucky. They visited at least six public and private centers, toured them and found nothing. When asked, workers at the centers said they had not sustained any gunshot wounds in the past few hours.
Until then, what little public information was available was confusing. On Friday, the state police reported some “incidents” in Matamoros with victims and injuries via social networks. The only confirmed victim at the time was a 33-year-old Mexican woman. This Tuesday, the governor of the state, Américo Villarreal, declared that in reality there were not two events, but only one. One of the bullets fired by the kidnappers flew a block and a half from the scene and hit the woman, who died shortly thereafter.
Four people on the ground during the shooting in Matamoros last Friday, in a photo posted to social media.RR SS
5. March
On Sunday, investigators moved to Reynosa, 100 kilometers to the west. To see the content of the security cameras, they had to go to the C-5 facilities, the coordination center for the public video surveillance system. They began to reconstruct the Pacific’s route and recognized the large number of vehicles involved in the pursuit. To this day, the number of people involved in the pursuit, attack and kidnapping remains a mystery. Prosecutors simply said they discovered four gunmen descended from one of the black Silverados.
That night, the FBI turned the case on its head when it announced that the four disappeared were US citizens. The agency reported that they entered Matamoros in the Pacific that same Friday. The agency offered rewards for data that could help locate them and find those responsible.
6th March
The case started growing early Monday when the media wheel was launched. US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar released a statement declaring that his government has “no higher priority than the safety of our citizens” and recalled the dangers of traveling to Tamaulipas. According to the US government, “Heavily armed members of criminal groups often patrol areas of the state and operate with impunity, particularly along the border region from Reynosa to Nuevo Laredo. In these areas, local police have limited ability to respond to criminal incidents.”
The White House also referred to the matter. President Joe Biden’s spokeswoman, Karine Jean-Pierre, said: “Our thoughts are with the families of these individuals. We stand ready to provide the necessary consular support.”
Investigators, made up of officers from the Army, Navy, federal and local prosecutors, among others, conducted searches in communities near Playa Baghdad, the coastal area near Matamoros, including one that same Monday morning known places like La Lagunona, in the Ejido El Tecolote, but they found nothing. In the afternoon, the Tamaulipas Prosecutor’s Office set up a phone number and email address so anyone could contact them with information about the whereabouts of the disappeared or the vehicles involved.
Soldiers are preparing a search mission for US citizens this Monday.STR (AP)
The search lasted late into the night. A call to 911 led the search party to a “camp” at an undisclosed location. There, the complainant had said, were the victims. A wooden shed on wooden stilts and a Breaking Bad-style RV made up the camp. When investigators arrived, no one was there.
Another call this afternoon alerted the search team that one of the trucks involved in Friday’s attack was on Guinea Street in a suburb south of the city. But just like with the camp, when the agents got there, they found nothing. Another complainant called during the night to say the same thing. Investigators returned, but again, they didn’t see the van or anything suspicious.
7th March
Without having explained the reason, investigators returned to the La Lagunona area in the El Tecolote Ejido early this Tuesday. This time the search party found the four missing in a small wooden hut. There they also arrested a 24-year-old man, José Guadalupe N., who appeared to be acting as a security guard. When authorities arrived, two of the four were dead. It is not known how they died. When asked about this, neither prosecutor Barrios nor Governor Villarreal described in detail the injuries sustained. Barrios said experts from the prosecutor’s office are conducting the autopsies.
While authorities found the four friends, the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, offered a press conference at the National Palace in Mexico City, as he does every morning. At 9:00 am, two hours after it started, a journalist finally asked about the case. At that moment, the Minister of Security, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, said in a low voice to the President: “They have already been found.” The President then asked his officer to come in and she gave him her cell phone. Governor Villarreal was on the phone.
The shed where the kidnapped US citizens were found in the La Lagunona area on Tuesday DANIEL BECERRIL (Portal)
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