The five men lay prostrate on the sidewalk outside their black pickup truck, their shirts pulled up over their heads and their bound hands held out before them almost in supplication.
The handwritten letter on the van’s windshield read like a formal, if chilling, apology: The Gulf Cartel’s Grupo Escorpión lamented that its members accidentally shot and killed two Americans and a Mexican bystander while kidnapping two other Americans. . The men were being offered to make amends for disturbing public order.
On March 10, Mexican prosecutors filed charges against the five men in connection with the kidnapping and murders.
While the Mexican drug cartels thrive in a vacuum of law and order, there is an unspoken rule that many members of organized crime groups are careful not to cross: no touching Americans. The United States takes attacks on its citizens seriously, and the response to such violence, on both sides of the border, can be ruinous for a cartel.
“When American citizens are attacked, the US government exerts pressure, they involve their security agencies and then they start to pressure Mexico to act,” said Cecilia Farfán Méndez, a security researcher in Mexico at the University of California, San Juan. Diego.
The cartels can often outgun the Mexican authorities or simply buy their cooperation, but they know that goading the US government into action can hamper their ability to operate.
The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took office promising a new approach to quelling violence: avoiding direct confrontation with criminal groups, in favor of tackling the root causes of crime, such as corruption and poverty. But his strategy, which he gave the slogan “hugs, not bullets,” has done little to tame extraordinary levels of violence or diminish the power of cartels that traffic drugs and migrants.
In many communities, Mexicans live in fear of criminal groups. And while the cartels avoid targeting Americans, their business model is based on shipping narcotics north that have fueled an epidemic of deaths in the United States.
The Biden government has been reluctant to openly criticize López Obrador, fearful of losing his cooperation on migration. But the March 3 attack on four Americans increased pressure to do more, prompting calls from Republicans to authorize US military forces to take on the cartels.
Mexican officials demanded that the US government respect their sovereignty, but they deployed hundreds of additional Mexican security forces to Matamoros, the scene of the attack.
Criminal groups have largely not acted against Americans since the 1985 kidnapping, torture and murder of Enrique Camarena, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who had disrupted cartel operations. In their quest for justice, the DEA launched Operation Legend, which revealed that Mexican authorities had covered up the murder and destroyed evidence. The operation led to the arrest of cartel members and forced others into hiding. The message was clear: going after US agents would have far-reaching consequences for criminals.
Over time, the cartels learned that even mistakenly killing US citizens could be costly.
In 2019, an organized crime group opened fire on Americans and Mexicans driving through the northern state of Sonora, killing three women and six children, part of a Mormon group living in Mexico. Subsequently, several people were arrested, including a Mexican police chief. The Mexican government claimed the attack could have been a case of mistaken identity and related to a conflict between two criminal groups vying for control.
Mexican authorities were said to be considering a similar explanation for the kidnapping and murder of the Americans in Matamoros.
Those who live in Matamoros, which is part of the State of Tamaulipas, say that what happened to Americans is what they face every day, but what made this case different was the attention it received due to the nationality of the victims.
“Who is talking about the woman who died here?” said Alberto Salinas, who owns a house next to where the attack took place, referring to the murdered Mexican woman.
While Mexicans have often found letters with dead bodies, the recent note was unusual in that all five men accompanying it were alive. Leaving the men alive could have been for them to give statements to support the narrative that the cartel did not order the assault.
By: Maria Abi-Habib and Natalie Kitroeff
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6613311, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-15 18:10:07
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