Two Americans who were kidnapped in Mexico last week were found dead on 8th March. The other two were found alive and are now in the care of US authorities. The kidnapping occurred in Matamoros, a border town in the state of Tamaulipas, while the four victims were on their way to a tummy tuck surgery for one of the group. The group had driven from Brownsville, Texas, and were in a white minivan with North Carolina license plates when gunmen began shooting at their car. The gunmen then took the Americans in another vehicle and drove them away.
Mexican authorities are considering various theories about motives for the attack, including the possibility that the Americans were mistaken for smugglers of Haitian migrants. Illegal migrant crossings at the U.S. southern border have soared in recent months, spurring tension among criminal groups who control human trafficking through northern Mexico. During the initial confrontation between the victims and the kidnappers, "an innocent Mexican citizen" was killed.
It is common for Americans to get entangled in violence in northern Mexico, a shared border nearly 2,000 miles long with large swaths dominated by drug cartels and criminal organizations. However, it is unusual for US nationals to be kidnapped in Mexico. The seemingly targeted nature of the kidnapping, with a car ramming into the vehicle the American nationals were traveling in, has led to questions about whether or not the victims were mistaken for someone else.
The video of the kidnapping shows three men dragging people on the ground and then lifting and dropping them in the bed of a white pickup truck. At least one of the men wore an armored vest, and they were dragging the people in clear view of nearby traffic. While Americans can be victims of the violence that plagues much of the border, it is often because they are at the wrong place at the wrong time, traversing a frontier rife with criminal activity and drug cartels that actively push drugs, migrants and even endangered wildlife into the United States for a profit, sometimes with the help of corrupt Mexican authorities.
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