Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the Gulf Cartel if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by Reynosa’s “AC Del Angel.”
REYNOSA, Tamaulipas –Another afternoon near the border, another day of shootouts in the border city of Reynosa where earlier this week cartel gunmen and federal forces clashed. The community remains tense in the city and the violence does not stop in spite of the various operations by government task forces that were recently intensified when the various factions of the Gulf cartel went to war.
A federal police operation ended in an armed clash after the cops noticed various vehicles with cartel gunmen riding in the Las Fuentes neighborhood. When the cops tried to stop them, the armed civilians answered with a volley of gunfire before starting a high speed pursuit that turned into a rolling shootout.
Neighbors and citizen journalists took to social media to alert one another about the gunfights, with the first all-out gun battle taking place in the second wooded area of Fuentes Boulevard.
In the neighborhoods of Las Fuentes, Fuentes Lomas, Aztlán, Cumbres and Libramiento gunmen tried to flee from federal forces, setting off a clash and another series of pursuits as authorities tried to capture the aggressors.
A gunman was arrested in front of San Judas’ Church in the Cañada neighborhood, while the shootouts continued in Circuito de Independencia Street and Tres Picos; this was where one of the most intense confrontations took place ending with a white SUV truck getting surrounded by federal agents. At Mil Cumbres Boulevard and Oriente Dos was another shootout took place but the gunmen managed to escape.
The shootouts were so intense that the municipal government took to social media to alert citizens with a warning message telling them to the areas where the shootouts took place during the “risk situation”. At the area near 20th Street, cartel gunmen managed to escape from the chase amid an intense conflict and ten minutes after that aggression began, federal forces killed and arrested some gunmen.
In the surrounding neighborhoods, authorities kicked off a manhunt to track down and capture the gunmen who had managed to escape during the chases and shootouts.
While the manhunt took place there was another gun battle where cartel gunmen had been driving an SUV when they were spotted by federal forces, the gunmen quickly began to shoot at the cops in an effort to avoid getting caught.
The area that leads to Pharr International Bridge, at the intersection of Colosio Boulevard and Loma Blanca was the place that saw some of the most intense fighting for several minutes.
In the Fuentes and Tres Picos area, crime scene analysts worked in the cordoned off area collecting bodies and apparently collecting evidence.
At the end of the day, the unofficial body count resulted in three dead gunmen during both clashes, and indeterminate number of arrests as well as multiple vehicles and weapons seized. As usual, the official information from authorities has been almost non-existent.
These daily accounts have become a regular part of the raging war in Tamaulipas. The border cities that border Texas have been the area where the security situation has been on red alert for the last five years.