REYNOSA, Tamaulipas — During a visit to this border city, members of the International Red Cross found empty schools and fear in the streets after months of regular, large-scale gun battles by cartel members featuring grenade launchers, machine guns, and armored vehicles.
During his visit to Mexico, Peter Maurer, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross spent time in Reynosa, a battlefront between rival groups of the Gulf Cartel that continue to fight over the territory. The purpose of the visit by the Red Cross was to evaluate the effects of organized crime and illegal immigration in Tamaulipas. One of the concerns expressed by Maurer was the humanitarian crisis in the northern parts of Mexico where citizens cannot enjoy access to basic services like education or medical care without running the risk of becoming victims to organized crime.
During his trip, Maurer shared on social media various messages where he tries to offer a sense of depth to the problem. One of the messages reveals an empty school after classes were suspended due to the recent gun battles by the Gulf Cartel.
“Our concern in Mexico, our basic proposal to the Mexican government is that derived from our experience in war zone and that some of the impacts are the same, some of the answers that we have proposed could be interesting to the Mexican government for consideration,” Maurer said in an interview with Mexico’s El Universal.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León 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 various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas 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 Tony Aranda from Nuevo León.