May 18, 2023

2023-05-18 18:08:02

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican soldiers found 49 migrants, including 11 children, who had been kidnapped from a bus a few days ago, authorities said Thursday.

Defense Secretary General Luis Cresencio Sandoval reported that 650 police and military officers participated in the search for the migrants, who had disappeared on Tuesday.

The last 33 migrants were found Thursday morning in an area where another mass kidnapping of migrants occurred in April. Sandoval said the kidnappers have not been arrested and the bus drivers have not been found.

The migrants recounted that they were taken by force by a drug cartel when the bus stopped at a gas station in northern Mexico.

Sandoval did not identify the cartel responsible for the mass kidnapping, but acknowledged that the Gulf Cartel and other criminal organizations operate in that area, where the states of San Luis Potosí and Nuevo León border.

The secretary also did not rule out that more migrants are found, since there is no clear figure of how many people were on the bus.

Sandoval said that at the moment the main priority is to find the bus drivers. In past cases, drivers have been beaten or killed by the hijackers. In other cases, the drivers were found to have consorted with the hijackers.

The migrants were heading north to the US border from the southern state of Chiapas by bus on Tuesday when they were kidnapped.

Nine migrants were found Tuesday near a highway in the state of Nuevo León. Another 40 were found wandering other roads or taking refuge in houses between Wednesday and Thursday.

Sandoval said the migrants included 19 Hondurans, 14 Haitians, seven Venezuelans, six Salvadorans, two Brazilians and one Cuban.

The bus company first reported the kidnapping on Tuesday, telling local press it had received a demand for $1,500 per migrant to release them.

It is the second group of migrants to disappear in the vicinity of the city of Matehuala. Some 20 people were kidnapped from vans there in April. At that time, the police launched an extensive search operation by land and air. He found not only the 20 migrants he was looking for, but also another 80 who were being held once morest their will, apparently by the same criminal organization.

More than 2,000 migrants were kidnapped by smuggling gangs and drug cartels in 2022, according to a government report released in May. The Mexican migration agency said authorities released 2,115 migrants of various nationalities who had been kidnapped by gangs in 2022.

It appears that criminal organizations charge migrants to cross Mexico and then kidnap them for ransom. There have been a series of such mass kidnappings of migrants in Mexico in recent months.

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