When the truck with North Carolina plates crossed the border from Brownsville, Texas, to Matamoros, Mexico, on Friday, the so-called falcons in charge of monitoring the border area notified their bosses of the presence of four Americans.
The gunmen, who have not been identified or linked to any of the cartels operating in the area, opened fire on the car. In the fusillade, a 33-year-old Mexican woman who was more than a block away was killed by a stray bullet. Immediately afterward the occupants of the vehicle were kidnapped.
One version of the tragedy disseminated by the Mexican authorities is that the gunmen belonged to one of the seven cartels that are fighting over the Mexican border city and mistook the four Americans — who were crossing the border for a medical procedure — with smugglers of Haitian origin and decided to confront them to demarcate their territory. In Matamoros, a city of just over 500,000, there is a fight to the death among the cartels: the Zetas, Jalisco New Generation, El Golfo, La Familia Michoacana, Sinaloa, Juárez and the Northeast.
