MONTERREY: The armed men who abducted 32 migrants in northern Mexico over the weekend intended to extort money from them and their families in the United States, Mexico’s president said on Thursday, one day after the migrants were freed.
He said that the migrants, who were discovered on Wednesday, had been abandoned by their kidnappers in a parking lot of a shopping center in the northern city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas.
“Because there was a strong deployment (from Mexican authorities), they decided to free them, safe and sound,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador stated at a press conference in the morning.
The case has underlined the dangers that hundreds of thousands of migrants endure each year when they traverse through Mexico on their way to the US border, where they are targets of extortion and kidnapping by powerful criminal groups.
Human rights groups have been warning for months about an expanding kidnapping issue in Reynosa, where Reuters uncovered a pattern of kidnappings and sexual assaults of migrants and asylum seekers last year.
According to Mexican officials, the 32 migrants were taken on Saturday from a commercial bus that had left the northern city of Monterrey for Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas. Officials stated that they were forced from the bus while driving through Reynosa and hauled away in automobiles by armed men.
In a second example, officials in the border state of Sonora announced on Thursday that they had recovered approximately 20 migrants, many of whom had been kidnapped from buses.
The trio kidnapped in Reynosa was located when an anonymous caller alerted authorities to their presence, according to a spokesman for the state security agency.
He said the 32 migrants ranged in age from a 71-year-old man to a 1-year-old baby girl, with 11 juveniles, and that 26 were from Venezuela and six were from Honduras.
The state attorney general’s office stated that the migrants had submitted their testimony and that an investigation had been launched. So far, no one has been arrested, according to Cuellar.
Late Thursday, Mexico’s national migration institute announced that the migrants will be granted humanitarian visas.
In 2023, a record number of migrants crossed Central America and Mexico on their way to the United States, fleeing poverty, violence, climate change, and conflict.
Earlier this week, a 4,000-person caravan making its way through southern Mexico disbanded after leaders claimed that migration authorities had offered to give travel permits.
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However, the caravan’s leader, Luis Garcia, stated in a statement on Thursday that officials had “abandoned on the street” some migrants.
The migration institute in Mexico did not respond to a request for comment.
The mass kidnapping has raised dread among Mexican migrants.
Diego Vargas, 25, of Colombia, said he and his wife earned a coveted appointment on a US government app called CBP One just after Christmas, allowing them to approach a port of entry and lawfully enter the US.
He stated that the appointment will take place at the Matamoros border in mid-January.
However, after learning of the kidnapping, he claims he and his wife are confronted with an unthinkable choice: risk their lives traveling on the same roadway, or return to their country, where they allegedly fled death threats from a paramilitary group.
