HAS SITUATION CHANGED IN MATA? QUESTIONS ON KIDNAPPING

By Jack Herrera

Texas Monthly

For the thousands of travelers who cross into Matamoros, Mexico, from Brownsville every day, the commute across the border requires a practiced vigilance. Since the days of Mexican bootleggers tunneling whiskey into Prohibition-era Texas, gangs in Matamoros have vied for control of cross-border contraband routes. 

Their battles are unpredictable and brutal, and, for those who travel to the city, the trick to stay safe has come down to a simple maxim: don’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mexicans who live there summarize this same guidance in a different way: no seas estupido. (Don’t be stupid.) 

The most important rule is to cross the border during the day: northern neighborhoods, right along the wall, can get rough at night, but are typically safe in the midst of bustling traffic. Other rules range from the obvious – avoid flashing expensive watches or bags, and avoid driving a car with foreign plates or plates from a different Mexican state – to the more unique – don’t wear shorts, as locals don’t wear shorts.

For the past few years, this approach has worked in Matamoros, even as its home state of Tamaulipas has endured some of the worst violence in the hemisphere, as heavily armed factions of the balkanized Gulf Cartel battle for supremacy over various cities. 

In Reynosa, just up the Rio Grande from Matamoros and across the river from McAllen, many aid workers now avoid crossing altogether. However, Matamoros has enjoyed relative calm. It’s one of the few border cities where the U.S. State Department permits its employees to work. Every day, hundreds of Texan border residents cross into the city to visit family, get health care, or just grab a meal; thousands more cross the other direction, on a daily commute to work.

For fronterizos living on both sides of the border, however, assumptions that there were rules one could follow to improve safety were shattered on March 3. A group of four U.S. citizens, who said they were traveling from South Carolina for cheaper cosmetic surgery in Mexico, crossed the border in a white minivan just after 9 a.m. 

Moments after they got into Matamoros, in broad daylight and in full view of border traffic and cameras, a pickup truck rammed into their car, and masked men began to open fire. The armed men picked up the limp bodies of the minivan’s injured passengers, dragged them across the road, and tossed them into the bed of the pickup truck.

Everything about the kidnapping looked unusual. While murder and kidnappings are not uncommon in Matamoros, they’ve typically remained isolated to certain neighborhoods, much like crime in U.S. cities: violence is often committed among networks of perpetrators and victims who know each other. 

The incident on March 3, however, broke all the rules that cross-border travelers rely on to stay safe, and defied the assumption of some that U.S. citizens had little to fear.

A president of a private security company who has lived and worked in northern Mexico for more than a decade and requested anonymity to avoid alienating prospective Mexican clients, explained how strange the attack was. He said that, despite what you see in the movies, the cartels typically “don’t just go around open firing on random people.” 

In general, the only time they’ll risk a daylight balacera is when they’re fighting cops or rival cartels. And, typically, when cartels do injure someone, they don’t take them hostage where they’ll require nursing and an armed guard. Yet the attackers in Matamoros loaded the injured into their truck.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the kidnapping, however, was the prompt law enforcement response to it. In Matamoros, Mexican police acted with uncommon alacrity and arrested multiple suspects. Within days, two survivors were found in a shack, not far from the Gulf Coast; the other two

had died from their injuries. Mexican authorities soon came across another crime scene, discovering a group of five suspected gang members, bound apparently by their own comrades, dumped in the street with a note from one of Matamoros’s major gangs apologizing for the attack on U.S. citizens.

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