Safety questions roil US-Mexico border region
Death of Americans shocks residents
Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, an immigrant advocate who works in Matamoros, was stunned to hear about a violent attack in the Mexican border town March 3.
The attack itself wasn’t shocking. What surprised her were the victims: four people from the United States.
“It happens all the time,” she said as she crossed into Mexico from Brownsville, Texas, which she does each day to run a nonprofit for migrant aid. “But it’s usually aimed at asylum-seekers, not anyone else.”
The attack and Tuesday’s announcement that two Americans had been found and two others were dead – all of them missing since an apparently brazen daylight attack March 3 – have stunned the region despite its deep history of smuggling and cartel violence.
At the same time, the attacks highlight the way similar abductions, killings or other violence can plague the community but draw little public outcry when they involve Mexicans or migrants. With details about the Americans’ deadly venture still scarce, it was unclear how either law enforcement or regular travel could be affected by the case going forward.
Brendon Tucker lived and worked in Matamoros in 2019 helping asylum-seekers through an advocacy agency. When a cartel group disapproved of his activities, he said, he was warned twice through a third person to cease his interactions with migrants. He later left Matamoros and today works as a project manager for Global Response Medicine in Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas.
To have cartel gunmen shoot and kidnap Americans without provocation seems like a departure from their modus operandi, Tucker said.
Days after the incident, five bound men were found in Matamoros with a letter purportedly from the Scorpion faction of the Gulf cartel. The note said that the cartel was handing over the five members “who were directly involved and responsible in the events, who at all times acted under their own decisionmaking and lack of discipline.”
The letter included an apology to residents of Matamoros, a Mexican woman who was killed by a stray bullet, and the four Americans and their families.
Federal investigators believe the Americans were mistakenly targeted and there was nothing to indicate they were in Mexico for any other purpose than a medical procedure, a person familiar with the investigation said. An official statement called the case only “an ongoing criminal investigation.”
Zalandria Brown of Florence, South Carolina, said authorities told her that her younger brother, Zindell Brown, 28, was among the four Americans in the case.
“This is like a bad dream you wish you could wake up from,” Brown told The Associated Press. “To see a member of your family thrown in the back of a truck and dragged, it is just unbelievable.” Brown said the four had traveled together from South Carolina so one of them could get a tummy tuck from a doctor in Matamoros.
Mexican officials said Friday’s attack and abduction happened just 21⁄2 hours after the group crossed the border for a medical appointment.
Tamaulipas state Attorney General Irving Barrios Mojica said the victims were found Tuesday around 8 a.m. in a house outside Matamoros. A suspect who was standing guard over them has been arrested.
Barrios Mojica said last week that the two deceased Americans – identified by authorities as Shaeed Woodard, 33, and Zindell Brown, in his mid-20s – would undergo autopsies and be returned to the U.S.
The injured survivor was identified as Eric Williams. The other one is Latavia Washington McGee. Mexican officials returned them to the United States on Tuesday.
Many Americans visit
The State Department lists Tamaulipas as a Level 4, Do Not Travel destination. But Americans still cross the border overland – to visit extended families that straddle or for less expensive medical care.
Charlene D’Cruz, an immigration attorney in Brownsville who works with asylum-seekers and travels frequently to Matamoros, said it’s not uncommon for U.S. citizens to travel to Matamoros for medical procedures ranging from dental work to cancer treatment to cosmetic surgery and cheaper prescriptions. The treatments are often offered at a fraction of U.S. costs, she said.
One place in particular, the Centro Medico Internacional, houses doctors specializing in an array of specialties, said D’Cruz, who traveled there last year for a respiratory exam. The new case has made her and others postpone future trips, she said.
“This is brutal,” D’Cruz said. “It’s horrible.”
Advocates have been warning for years that migrants were being kidnapped, extorted and killed in north Mexican border towns such as Matamoros, Reynosa and Nueva Laredo as they waited their turn to seek asylum in the United States. But rarely did that violence extend to U.S. citizens, they said. Cartels would prefer not to draw U.S. attention to their illicit activities.
Difficult to quantify
Duncan Wood, vice president of the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank, and senior adviser to the Mexico Institute, said cartels and criminal groups may target migrants or wealthy people but tend to avoid everyday U.S. citizens because of the attention such cases carry.
Even though Matamoros is in Tamaulipas, which the U.S. State Department says travelers should avoid because of the danger of kidnapping and other crimes, he said it was possible the Americans were mistaken for rivals or migrants.
“If they were, in fact, going over for medical tourism, which happens all the time, then generally they would have been left alone by Mexican organized crime,” he said.
The overall prevalence of kidnappings is difficult to accurately quantify, he said. Many aren’t reported including when families believe police can’t effectively investigate or kept quiet when a kidnapped wealthy executive is freed after paying a private ransom.
Is Mexico safe overall?
Security analysts say many parts of the country are safe for tourists, such as Mexico City and major beach destinations such as Los Cabos and Cancún. But large swaths of Mexico fall under the control of cartels.
“There are many Mexicos,” said Falko Ernst, senior Mexico analyst for the International Crisis Group. “You have to pay attention to which one you’re going to.”
Last August, the State Department issued an updated travel advisory for Americans visiting Mexico, including new state-level advice and information on “kidnapping risk,” and cited an “increased risk of crime and kidnapping” in certain areas of Mexico.
Laura Calderon, program director of Justice in Mexico, a research initiative at the University of San Diego, said kidnappings in Mexico dipped during the COVID-19 pandemic in part because cartels had to spend more time finding ways to transport drugs.
But conflict has flared in Tamaulipas over the past 15 years as the incumbent Gulf Cartel – founded in Matamoros – fragmented, starting with its notoriously violent armed wing, Los Zetas. Analysts say factions of the Gulf Cartel are fighting over the crime territory in Matamoros, which is coveted as a corridor for drug smuggling.