FBI joins investigation of deadly ambush in Mexico
The Mexican government has invited the FBI to participate in the investigation into the attack on three carloads of women and children from an isolated community just south of the Arizona border.
In a joint statement Sunday, Mexico’s Security and Citizen Protection Secretariat and Foreign Relations Secretariat said the FBI would be invited to “accompany”
investigators from the federal prosecutor’s office examining the shootings that killed nine people Nov. 4.
Authorities have said gunmen opened fire on the families from a fundamentalist community as they drove through a remote and rugged region — killing three women and six children. All held U.S. and Mexican citizenship, relatives said.
Officials at the FBI confirmed that they would be “providing assistance at
the invitation of the Mexican government with the investigation into the recent attack against American citizens.”
FBI agents working in Mexico would be unarmed, while working alongside Mexican investigators, according to the Mexican agencies’ statement, and would “perform certain binational, technical support activities.”
The Mexican government described its collaboration with the FBI as “broad” and said it occurs in “various federal Mexican institutions responsible for the pursuit of justice.”
The killings in northern Sonora state came as Mexico confronts a rising tide of violence. The homicide rate reached a record high of more than 33,000 in 2018, while violence stemming from cartel conflicts and crimes such as “huachicoleo” — gangs pilfering gasoline from pipelines and fencing it — have turned to once-placid pockets of the country into no-go areas.
On Friday, the U.S. government increased its security alert to prohibit personnel from traveling to the city of Chihuahua, capital of the state of the same name, some 235 miles south of El Paso. At least 38 homicides in Chihuahua state, which neighbors Sonora, were reported in just 30 hours prior to the warning being issued.
Also, 16 vehicles and buses were burned in Ciudad Juárez, which sits next to El Paso, according to Mexican media. Those attacks left nine workers traveling to their factory jobs with severe burns. They were blamed on a gang known as Los Mexicles, which wanted to create chaos in the city and thwart the revision of a local prison, the newspaper La Jornada reported.
Ten more bodies were also discovered over the weekend in a mass grave being exhumed in Puerto Peñasco, also known as Rocky Point, on the Gulf of California near the Arizona border.
The slayings of the women and children, however, captured intense international attention and cast a critical eye on the security policies of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He has proposed calming the country by combating what he considers to be the underlying causes of crime: poverty and corruption. He speaks often of “hugs, not bullets.”
Most murders in Mexico go unpunished. The rate of impunity in the state of Sonora, scene of the attack, hovers been 70% and 80%, according to online news organization Animal Politico.