Cartel Gunmen Steal Human Cargo near Mexican Border

A convoy of cartel gunmen hijacked a passenger bus full of travelers, stealing 24 illegal aliens who were headed to the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo. The human cargo was ultimately heading to be illegally smuggled into Texas.

The kidnapping took place Monday night when a passenger bus left the Mexican port city of Tampico Tamaulipas heading towards Monterrey Nuevo Leon, information provided to Breitbart Texas by the Tamaulipas government revealed. The city of Tampico and the surrounding communities make up one of the largest commercial areas in Tamaulipas and in recent years has been the scene of a wave of kidnappings by cartel members looking to make money from ransom and extortion. As Breitbart Texas previously reported, one of the kidnappings that became international news took place last September when cartel gunmen kidnapped and executed the father and son of award winning Hollywood film director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde.

The kidnapped busload of illegal aliens had just left Tampico when it pulled into an inspection station in the neighboring city of Altamira, that is where a convoy of cartel gunmen took control of the bus at gunpoint. The cartel gunmen took the human cargo who had traveled from Honduras and let the rest of the passengers continue on their journey.

On Tuesday shortly after midnight, Mexican Federal Police and Tamaulipas police were able to locate the 24 kidnapped illegal aliens at a stash house in Altamira near the Laguna de la Puerta neighborhood. Once authorities rescued them, the illegal immigrants were medically evaluated and then turned over to Mexico’s National Immigration Institute.

This kidnapping of immigrants out of a bus comes less than six years after Los Zetas executed 72 illegal immigrants from Central and South America in the rural town of San Fernando. That massacre took place on August 24, 2010. Just six months later, Mexican authorities began to discover dozens of mass graves where at least 193 victims had been buried; however, confessions from Zeta gunmen point to as many as 600 bodies being buried in the clandestine graves.

After much pressure, the Tamaulipas government was forced to admit that the victims had been taken off buses or carjacked as they travelled along Mexican highways.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.