A wounded Ecuadorean who escaped the killing ground in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state told authorities that the migrants’ abductors identified themselves as Zetas, a drug gang whose control of parts of the state is so brutal and complete that even many Mexicans avoid traveling its highways.Migrants running the gauntlet up Mexico to reach the United States have long faced extortion, violence and theft. But reports have grown of mass kidnappings of migrants, who are forced to give the telephone numbers of relatives in the United States or back home who are then required to transfer ransom payments to the abductors. Teresa Delagadillo, who works at the Casa San Juan Diego shelter in Matamoros just across from Brownsville, Texas, said she often hears stories about criminal gangs kidnapping and beating migrants to demand money -- but never a horror story on the scale of this week’s massacre. “There hadn’t been reports that they had killed them,” she said.
In an April report, Amnesty International called the plight of tens of thousands of mainly Central American migrants crossing Mexico for the US a major human rights crisis. The report called their journey “one of the most dangerous in the world” and said every year an untold number of migrants disappear without a trace.
Mexico’s government has confirmed at least seven cases of cartels kidnapping groups of migrants so far this year, said Antonio Diaz, an official with the National Migration Institute, a think tank that studies immigration.
