EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Mexican authorities have stepped up security around Juarez International Airport following a pair of fatal shootings allegedly linked to migrant trafficking.
The latest shooting involved a ride-share driver and someone apparently on the way to pick up his family at the airport. That double murder took place Friday evening on the Pan American Highway. On April 23, a man driving along the same highway near the airport was shot to death as assailants were gunning for another ride-share driver who got away, Juarez police said.
“In some cases, it’s because they are transporting migrants that the different cartels are fighting for. They tend to make effect of those attacks to take away” the migrants, Chihuahua Deputy Attorney General Carlos Manuel Salas said at a news conference on Tuesday.
He said the Mexican National Guard, the state and city police have increased their presence at the airport and on the highway to discourage further attacks.
The airport “is a zone where they fight for these migrants, which are among the few that have the economic means to fly from their countries of origin to get to the United States,” Salas said.
Last month, Border Report learned of a mass kidnapping of Ecuadorian migrants who flew to Juarez from Mexico City. Smugglers escorted the migrants to a safe house, which was attacked by a rival group that took the Ecuadorians captive and demanded a ransom of up to $40,000 from their relatives in the U.S., according to a New York-based organization that assists Ecuadorian migrants.
Salas said police haven’t made many arrests in migrant kidnapping cases largely because the victims are reluctant to press charges.
“We have detained some (suspects) that were present in houses where people were kept captive, as was the case last week when we found more than 100 migrants in one house,” Salas said. “We detained three people, but none of the 125 migrants complained of being kept captive or being extorted or kidnapped.”
The state official said it’s not only the Mexican cartels that are involved in migrant smuggling, which has become a high-reward, low-risk activity for criminals. The presence of foreign criminal organizations also has been documented.
Salas said Venezuela’s violent Tren de Aragua has been linked to this activity in Mexico.
“We have known of Venezuelans who openly participate in these (smuggling events), not in great numbers but we have received information to that effect,” he said. “At our public safety meetings, we have learned from the National Guard, the army and the state police that this group, Tren de Aragua, (is involved) in managing people that ride the trains, people with scarce resources coming from Central American countries hungry, thirsty, mistreated.”
A number of alleged Tren de Aragua members have been arrested in the United States after crossing the Rio Grande in El Paso. One of them was Jose Ibarra, who is now jailed in Georgia in connection with the murder of American nursing student Laken Riley.
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