Dozens go missing from Mexico highway

MEXICO CITY — As many as 50 people are missing after setting out on three-hour car trips this year between Mexico’s industrial hub of Monterrey and the border city of Nuevo Laredo on a welltraveled stretch of road local media have dubbed “the highway of death.”

Relatives say family members simply vanished. The disappearances, and last week’s shooting of 15 apparently innocent bystanders in Reynosa, suggest Mexico is returning to the dark days of the 2006-2012 drug war.

“It’s no longer between the cartels; they are attacking the public,” activist Angelica Orozco said.

As many as half a dozen of those who disappeared on the highway are believed to be U.S. citizens or residents, though the U.S. Embassy could not confirm their status. One, Jose de Jesus Gomez from Irving, reportedly disappeared on the highway on June 3.

Most of the victims are believed to have disappeared approaching or leaving the cartel-dominated city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo. About a halfdozen men have reappeared alive, badly beaten, and all they will say is that armed men forced them to stop on the highway and took their vehicles.

What happened to the rest, including a woman and her two young children, remains a mystery. Most were residents of Nuevo Leon state, where Monterrey is located. Desperate for answers, relatives of the missing took to the streets in Monterrey on Thursday to protest, demanding answers.

Orozco, a member of the civic group United Forces for Our Disappeared, said the abductions seem to mark a return to the worst days of Mexico’s drug war, like in 2011 when cartel gunmen in the neighboring state of Tamaulipas dragged innocent passengers off buses and forced them to fight each other to the death with sledgehammers.

Then, as now, politicians and prosecutors have given the families

of the disappeared few answers.

“Now, more than 10 years after the disappearances in 2010 and 2011, they cannot continue to use the same pretexts,” Orozco said. But “they’re using the same lines. … In the last decade they were supposed to have created institutions

and procedures, but it’s the same old story of authorities doing nothing.”

United Forces for Our Disappeared sent out a press statement on May 19 warning people about the dangers on the MonterreyNuevo Laredo highway.

The government of Nuevo Leon state acknowledged 10 days later that it had received reports of 14 people who had disappeared on the highway so far in 2021, along with five more in neighboring Tamaulipas, where Nuevo Laredo is located.

But Nuevo Leon didn’t warn people against traveling on the highway until almost a month later on June 23.

It wasn’t until Friday that both state governments announced a joint program to increase policing and security on the highway, a step that, if it had been carried out a month earlier, might have saved dozens of lives.

“Only now is the National Guard going out to patrol the highway. Why did they wait so long?” asked Karla Moreno, whose husband, truck driver Artemio Moreno, disappeared on the road on April 13. She too is horrified that northern Mexico is reliving the experiences of a decade ago.

“How can this be happening? We were supposed to have more (law enforcement) resources by now,” she said.

Roberto Martinez / Associated Press As many as 50 people are missing after setting off on highway trips between Monterrey and the border city of Nuevo Laredo.