Authorities are searching for a doctor from Texas who worked in Mexico after he went missing for more than a week. The doctor is believed to have been kidnapped while driving to a border city hospital to perform an operation.
According to information released by the Tamaulipas Attorney General’s Office, 33-year-old Rodolfo Isaac Mendoza, Jr., a resident of Laredo, Texas, has been missing since August 8 from Reynosa, Tamaulipas. He was a graduate of the Chihuahua Autonomous University and had been carrying out his residency in Tamaulipas. Mendoza was driving a Ford Fusion with Texas license plates from Reynosa to Rio Bravo after being ordered by his direct supervisors to carry out a surgery over there, however, he never arrived at the hospital.
Since Mendoza is from Texas, the U.S. Consulate has been in communication with Tamaulipas state authorities in connection to the case.
After being notified of his disappearance, Tamaulipas state investigators went to his house in Reynosa where they found his medical equipment missing and that the house had been ransacked. Additionally, investigators told Breitbart Texas that the kidnappers tried to set fire to the house in the laundry room but the fire did not spread.
One of the theories being looked at by Tamaulipas investigators is that Gulf Cartel gunmen kidnapped Mendoza to have him care for wounded gunmen. This comes even after the Gulf Cartel had publicly announced that their warring factions had entered a truce in order to bring peace to the region. As Breitbart Texas has reported, rival factions of the Gulf Cartel had been at war for almost four years over control of lucrative drug trafficking and human smuggling routes.
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 “Francisco Morales and J.A. Espinoza from Tamaulipas.”