On Sept. 9, cartel gunmen fired on a group of travelers, which included four U.S. citizens, visiting a border town in Mexico. Pablo De La Rosa, a freelance journalist with Texas Public Radio and NPR, reported the incident which is just one of several recent gunfire incidents along the United States-Mexico border.
"El Mañana is reporting just now that gunmen carried out a shooting attack against a group of between 15 and 20 tourists from the United States, including American citizens and legal residents, in the border town of Miguel Alemán, Tamaulipas--across the border with Roma, Texas," reporter De La Rosa wrote in a Sept. 9 social media post on X, formerly Twitter. "At least about seven people are believed to have been injured during the gunfire attack."
According to a report by El Mañana de Reynosa, a Mexican newspaper based out of Reynosa, the time the attack took place is currently unknown, although the injured tourists were transferred at the International Bridge to U.S. hospitals at 4 a.m. It was reported that the first officials on the scene were members of the Mexican Army.
The group of tourists was reportedly traveling through an area where travel was inadvisable, especially at night. It is reported that the group was traveling to the interior of Mexico, likely to San Luis Potosí.
CBS News reports that there were 20 people in the group of travelers, including 16 Mexican nationals and four U.S. citizens, driving in three cars. It is unclear whether the seven injured people included any U.S. citizens.
In recent months, there has been an increase in violence in Tamaulipas, which the Mexican government responded to by sending hundreds of soldiers to the border cities of San Fernando, Reynosa, and Matamoros, CBS reports. It is believed that cells of the Gulf Cartel and other criminal organizations have been active in that area.
There was another incident in March where four U.S. citizens were kidnapped after crossing into Mexico. Two of the hostages tragically died during the rescue attempt, and members of the Gulf Cartel were among those arrested in the case.
According to Insight Crime, the Gulf Cartel reached its peak in the 1990s and 2000s, but since then, many of the cartel’s leaders have been either murdered or arrested, leading to fragmentation in the group. The group is actually no longer a unified organization but rather a loose assortment of criminal factions vying for control over the old cartel’s territory. The traditional center of the Gulf Cartel’s operations is the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
There have been a few shooting incidents in recent months along the Texas-Mexico border, as U.S. Border Patrol agents were fired upon from the Mexican side of the border in August, as previously reported by Federal Newswire.
