MEXICO CITY (AP) — Four U.S. citizens were kidnapped in the border town of Matamoros after gunmen opened fire on the vehicle they were traveling in, the FBI said.
The four men had arrived in Matamoros on Friday from Brownsville, Texas, on a day when there were violent clashes in the Mexican city with an undetermined death toll that prompted authorities to ask citizens to stay home.
The alert was issued Sunday by the FBI office in San Antonio.
President Andrés Manuel Lopez indicated on Monday that the Mexican government was dealing with the situation and that the Secretary of Security was working in coordination with the FBI to locate the people who, as he explained, entered Mexico to buy medication and were left in the middle. of a clash between armed groups.
According to initial information provided by the FBI, the Americans were traveling in a white van with North Carolina license plates and shortly after crossing into Mexico, unidentified gunmen shot them.
“The gunmen loaded the four U.S. citizens into another vehicle and fled with them,” the office said in a statement that also offered a $50,000 reward for the return of the victims and the arrest of the victims. responsible. .
US Ambassador Ken Salazar said Monday that his fellow citizens were abducted “at gunpoint…in an incident that tragically killed an innocent Mexican citizen.”
Mexican authorities have not given any official toll.
The public security secretary of Tamaulipas said on Friday that there had been “two armed incidents between unidentified civilians, deploring deaths and injuries” but without specifying the number. What he ruled out was that the army or the police were involved in the shooting.
“Officials from various U.S. law enforcement agencies are working with Mexican authorities at all levels of government to ensure the safe return of our compatriots,” added Ambassador Salazar.
Matamoros is the scene of a turf war between factions of the Gulf Cartel, an organization that has its stronghold in this city located on the far eastern border between Mexico and the United States, in the state of Tamaulipas .
The shootings in Matamoros reached such a scale on Friday that both local authorities and the US consulate issued alerts asking people to stay at home.
Videos were posted on social media showing the situation in the city and in one of them it was possible to see how armed men dragged what appeared to be two corpses towards a truck in broad daylight and surrounded of vehicles.
Tamaulipas, which borders Texas, has seen a strong wave of organized crime-related violence for decades and it is common for rival groups to take victims after clashes to hide them.
According to the Secretary of Security, the Army and Navy, National Guard, Federal Attorney’s Office and State Police increased their patrols in the city on Friday.
The two main cartels in the region are the Gulf Cartel, which has its stronghold in Matamoros, and a sliver of the old Zetas in Nuevo Laredo, 200 miles to the west. But there are also many cells from each of these groups fighting each other.
On the last weekend of February, five young men were killed by the army in Nuevo Laredo, in an event that has not yet been clarified as to what human rights organizations consider excessive use of strength. The federal prosecutor’s office is investigating the incident.