Why the Gulf Cartel would have revealed the location of the Americans in the Matamoros case

Cameras at C5 in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, showed a disturbing scene last Friday: a group of armed men dragged at least two bodies in the middle of the street, and in broad daylight, to load them into the back of a pickup truck.

It happened in Lauro Villar street and between five or six vehicles headed for Playa Bagdad, on the coast of Tamaulipas, near the border.

In Lauro Villar, the vehicle in which four American foreigners, identified as Latavia McGee, Shaeed Woodard, Zindella Brown and Eric Williams (a mother of six accompanied by three friends) They had arrived in Matamoros on the morning of March 3.

One of the travellers, according to authorities, I would have gone for liposuction. The unit had North Carolina license plates. The first version indicated that the “los levantados” were Haitians involved in drug trafficking.

Agents from the prosecutor’s office contacted US authorities at the US Consulate General in Matamoros to see if the vehicle had a theft report. However, as the weekend progressed, investigations clearly indicated that they were not Haitian nationals, but of a group of Americans whom that same morning had passed through from Brownsville, Texas.

On Sunday, the FBI became aware of the case and established communication with the Public Safety Secretary of Tamaulipas. The Office also asked for the help of citizens who could provide information: offered a big reward and opened a hotline for receiving data.

United States Ambassador, Ken Salazar, he communicated with Governor Américo Villarreal – who had been out practicing mountaineering while everything was going on. The public prosecutor’s office also asked for the cooperation of the citizens.

Calls started coming in throughout the day on Monday. Supposed witnesses spoke of convoys moving through gaps, burned vehicles, kidnapped migrants and abandoned corpses on ranches and outhouses.

Sources familiar with the investigation report that prosecutors, bolstered by more than 40 federal Conase agents, have split into search blocks and have begun following leads. “they went to all“, they explain. But they found nothing.

The “hawks” of the Gulf Cartel, which did not take long to detect the arrival of the Americans last Friday, had disappeared from the streets. There was no sign of Cyclones, nor the dreaded Scorpion Group. The search lasted all Monday night.

In the region there are ranches of hundreds and thousands of hectares. Places where in the distance stand only a few houses, some abandoned, in the middle of arid plains.

Yesterday morning, according to the authorities consulted, one of the groups approached the municipality of El Tecolote, near the site known as La Lagunota: a place of barely a hundred inhabitants spread over vast fields.

There was a small shed painted “shedron or brick color”. To one side were some of the trucks the investigators were looking for, and shortly after they found the two survivors of the drama that began in Lauro Villar street. There were also the bodies of those who lost their lives, and they were already decomposing.

The sources consulted indicate that it is likely that, given the scale of the problem, the Gulf Cartel itself revealed the location of the victims; which would explain why the living and the dead were taken from one place to another).

A young man of about 23, allegedly in charge of looking after the hostages, was apprehended at the scene. A source indicates that “I was educated“, What “asked for a lawyerwho refused to speak.

According to the official account, within hours of their arrival in Matamoros, CDG hitmen halted the Americans: they didn’t want to stop out of fear.

A group of trucks started chasing them, then they were shot down. One of the visitors started running: they shot him. The others fell to the ground. The hitmen dragged the four foreigners (at least one was already dead) into the bed of a van and chased them out of Matamoros. It all happened a few streets from the Municipal Palace, in the middle of Friday, at 11:40 am.

Visitors have been moved at least three times: “They kept them for a few hours, mixing the living with the dead, in a safe house. They were interrogated. Later they were taken to another place”.