Two of four U.S. citizens kidnapped at gunpoint last week in northern Mexico were found dead Tuesday, Mexican authorities said, while two others were freed and transported to the United States in a dramatic rescue operation that capped off a days-long manhunt.
The Americans were located Tuesday morning in a small wooden house in a field outside the violent border city of Matamoros, said Irving Barrios Mojica, the attorney general of Tamaulipas state. Mexican authorities detained one suspect, identified only as Jose Guadalupe N., 23, who they said was a guard at the house.
The two survivors — Latavia "Tay" McGee and Eric James Williams, badly wounded in his left leg — were rushed to the border in a convoy of ambulances and law enforcement vehicles and handed over to U.S. authorities in Brownsville, Texas.
The frantic rescue came four days after the group was apparently caught by mistake in a gunfight among rival criminal groups in a busy stretch of downtown Matamoros. A video showed the victims later being loaded into the back of a pickup truck by gunmen.
Their disappearance sparked an international incident, with the FBI launching an investigation, the White House intervening and some Republican members of Congress calling for invading Mexico with U.S. troops.
"This tragic incident only highlights a rising preoccupation in the United States about Mexico's lack of interest in facing down organized crime," said Tony Payan, director of the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University's Baker Institute. The kidnapping in Matamoros, he said, "has become a symbol of impunity in Mexico."
The U.S. government condemned the kidnapping and deaths, with National Security Council spokesman John Kirby saying Tuesday that "attacks on U.S. citizens are unacceptable, no matter where ... they occur."
And though Kirby said the FBI had worked closely with Mexican officials and would continue to collaborate, there was little doubt that the violence threatened to further inflame already high binational tensions over Mexico's security strategy.
Many in the U.S. have grown increasingly critical of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's "hugs not bullets" crime-fighting policy, which purports to emphasize social programs over violent confrontations with criminal groups, as well as his recent protection of a former defense minister charged by the U.S. for collaborating with organized crime.
While in practice López Obrador's strategy has largely resembled that of his predecessors, with regular seizures of drug shipments and arrests of cartel leaders, his softer rhetoric, combined with violent incidents such as the one in Matamoros, "reinforces the narrative being pushed on the right side of the U.S. political spectrum that Mexico is a lawless country," said security analyst Alejandro Hope.
"It sends a message that things like that can happen in Mexico — that someone that can randomly be shot and snatched on the street for no apparent reason," Hope said.
The Americans who were killed have not officially been identified, but were named by various news outlets as Shaeed Woodard and Zindell Brown.
Family members of the victims told news outlets that the four arrived in Matamoros on Friday so that McGee could undergo a medical treatment to remove abdominal fat.
Each year, thousands of U.S. citizens seek pharmaceuticals and medical procedures in Mexico, where drugs and treatments are generally much cheaper than in the United States.
According to the FBI, the four were in a white van with North Carolina license plates when "unidentified gunmen" fired on their vehicle. The Americans were then thrown into the back of a truck and spirited away. Mexican authorities said a Mexican woman was killed in the shootout.
Violence in broad daylight is common in Tamaulipas state, which has long been one of the most lawless regions of Mexico, and which is currently the focus of a turf war between dueling factions of the Gulf cartel. The state ranks high in homicides, kidnappings and "disappearances," although in the vast majority of cases, the victims are Mexicans.
That the victims this time were Americans immediately made the kidnapping international news.
On Tuesday, some Mexicans reacted to news of the rescue operation with a mixture of relief and exasperation. Seldom if ever do the frequent kidnappings of Mexican nationals attract such attention. And the vast majority go unsolved in a country where the number of "disappeared" has soared to more than 110,000.
"What has to happen so that the cases of kidnapping and disappearance in Mexico are investigated with the same speed with which they dealt with the case of the four Americans taken in Matamoros?" Pascal Beltran del Rio, a columnist at Excelsior newspaper, wrote on Twitter.
"The government only prosecutes criminals under foreign pressure," tweeted Lilly Tellez, a senator with the center-right National Action Party. "We Mexicans are utterly defenseless."
The attack came at a time when U.S. officials along the border and in Washington have become increasingly attuned to violence in Mexico.
Citing high levels of overdose deaths from Mexican-supplied fentanyl, several prominent Republicans, including former U.S. Atty. Gen. William Barr, have called in recent months for Mexican cartels to be designated as "terrorist organizations." And on Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., reiterated that he plans to push legislation that will "set the stage" for the use of U.S. military force in Mexico. "If you continue to give safe haven to drug dealers, then you are an enemy of the United States," he said Monday.
A formal terrorist designation for the cartels is highly unlikely, and legislation sending troops to Mexico is practically inconceivable, given the two countries' close relations on other fronts, including trade and migration.
On Tuesday López Obrador said that his government would not allow "foreign countries" to intervene in his nation's domestic affairs, adding that Mexico doesn't "meddle" in American law enforcement issues.
He criticized what he described as "tabloid" coverage of the Matamoros incident and said the media should pay more attention to violence against Mexicans in the United States.
But he also said he hoped it would not sour U.S.-Mexico relations.
"We are working daily to guarantee peace, security," the president said. "We are very sorry that this happened in our country and we send our condolences to the families of the victims."
Still under investigation, authorities said, was a central question: Why were the U.S. visitors in Matamoros attacked in a city where many tourists cross over daily from Brownsville with no problems?
Investigators suspect that they were the victims of "confusion," or mistaken identity, said Barrios. One theory is that the assailants may have opened fire after mistaking the van in which the U.S. citizens were traveling as a vehicle transporting rival gangsters.
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(Los Angeles Times special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez in Mexico City and Juan José Ramírez in Matamoros contributed to this report.)
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