Criminals in Mexico Violated Unwritten Rule: Leave Americans Alone
Five men were left on the sidewalk outside their black pickup truck, shirts pulled over their heads, bare bodies pressed to the ground, bound hands stretched out in front of them almost begging.
The handwritten letter on the truck’s windshield reads like a solemn, albeit cold, apology: the Gulf Scorpion Corporation regrets that its members were accidentally shot dead. two Americans and a Mexican bystands while abducting two more US citizens.
The letter said the men had been presented to the authorities as compensation for disturbing the peace. On Friday, Mexican prosecutors charged five men in connection with the kidnapping and murder.
While Mexican drug cartels thrive in the lawless environment that still exists inside Mexico, there is one unwritten rule that many members of organized crime groups must beware of. so as not to violate: do not touch Americans.
The United States takes attacks on its own citizens seriously and responds to such violence, on both sides of the border, that could harm a Mexican criminal group.
“When American citizens are targeted, the US government puts pressure on them, they pull in their own security agencies,” said Cecilia Farfán Méndez, a Mexican security researcher at the University of California, San Diego. stepped in and then began to pressure Mexico into action.
“The worst thing for the gangs is that they have to spend resources fighting the Mexican authorities barely leaving them alone,” she added. “It’s not good for business.”
Gangs can often take down the Mexican government or simply bribe their cooperation, but they know that urging the US government to act can hinder their ability to operate. And in recent years, organized crime has relied on the Mexican government’s inability to control it effectively.
The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took office promising a new approach to quelling violence: avoiding direct confrontations with criminal groups, in favor of addressing the root causes of crime such as corruption. and poverty.
But his strategy, dubbed by him by the tagline “hugs, not bullets,” has done little to tame the extraordinary levels of violence or diminish the growing power. expansion of cartels that transport drugs and migrants across the U.S. border and terrorize Mexicans back home.
In many communities, Mexicans live in fear of criminal groups that commit acts of violence on a daily basis that largely attract little attention outside the country. And while the gangs avoid intentionally targeting Americans, their business model based on transporting drugs north has contributed to fueling the epidemic of drug deaths in the United States.
The Biden administration has been reluctant to publicly criticize López Obrador, including on security issues in Mexico, wary of threatening his cooperation on migration.
But last week’s attack on four Americans has become an international scandal, increasing pressure on the US government to do more to fight crime south of the border, while also prompting politicians to Republican lawmakers called for authorization for the US military to confront the gangs.
The calls have sparked an outcry in Mexico, with officials demanding the US government respect its sovereignty, but also forcing the Mexican government to respond. This week, hundreds of additional Mexican security forces were deployed to Matamoros, the border city where the attack on four Americans took place.
That kind of undue attention is exactly what criminal groups want to avoid, and most of them have left American citizens alone since the kidnapping, torture and brutal murder of Enrique Camarena, a DEA agent, who disrupted the gang’s activities at the time and drew their bloody fury.
Mr. Camarena’s mutilated body was found wrapped in plastic bags on a farm in western Mexico, his hands and feet bound and his face unrecognizable after multiple blows with a blunt object.
In its quest for justice, the DEA launched Operation Legends, one of the largest homicide investigations conducted by the agency, revealing that Mexican authorities covered up Mr. Camarena’s murder and destroyed Mr. destroy valuable evidence. This activity led to the arrest of gang members and forced others to go into hiding.
The message is clear: the pursuit of American law enforcement officers will have far-reaching consequences for criminals and their accomplices in the Mexican government.
Corporations have eventually learned that even killing the wrong U.S. citizen can 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. Some of the victims were burned alive in their cars, about 70 miles south of the US border.
Several people were subsequently arrested, including a Mexican police chief who was said to be protecting local criminal groups. The Mexican government claims the deadly attack may have been a case of mistaken identity and involved a conflict between two criminal groups vying for control.
This week, Mexican authorities are said to be looking into a similar explanation for the kidnapping and murder of Americans in Matamoros, investigating whether it was a case of mistaken identity.
People living in Matamoros, part of the state of Tamaulipas and across from the Rio Grande from the extreme south of Texas, have endured daily outbreaks of violence that have claimed lives here, ever since criminal organizations began to consolidate. city control.
What’s happened to Americans is what they face every day, said Matamoros residents as they drop their kids off at school, buy groceries or drive to work.
But what makes this case different, they say in grief and anger, is the immense attention and pursuit of justice the case has received because of the nationalities of the victims.
“Who is talking about the dead woman here? No one,” Alberto Salinas said, referring to the Mexican shot dead in the attack. Mr. Salinas owned a home next to the scene of the attack, but was elsewhere at the time.
Tamaulipas is often dominated by the Gulf gang, one of the oldest criminal organizations in Mexico, but is divided into many different criminal groups. Even if all factions belong to the same overarching group, they are not always allied with each other.
Local leaders are often wary of people who might encroach on their territory. Jesús Pérez Caballero, a security expert and professor at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Matamoros, said the Scorpions team, which claimed to have written the letter, originated as a special force protecting a regional gang leader. Former bay.
While Mexicans often find letters from gangs accompanying a corpse, the one left this week is rarer because the five men found with it are all still alive.
Criminal organizations monitor their own members, experts say, especially if they draw too much attention to the group’s activities.
Leaving the men alive could be aimed at ensuring that they will give testimony to investigators that support the narrative that the gang did not order the attack. Lower-ranking members of such groups sometimes act on their own, although it is unclear whether that is what is actually happening in this case.
Pérez Caballero said: “Many times murderers try to show their merits to people more powerful, and they do it alone and if they succeed, they will succeed. “And if it goes wrong, well, it goes wrong.”
Oscars Contribution reports from Mexico City.