Migrants shot by drugs gang for refusing to become hitmen, survivor claims

MEXICAN authorities yesterday began identifying 72 suspected migrants believed murdered for refusing to become hitmen for a drug cartel.

Mexican officials hoped to send consular agents from Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras to the ranch where Mexican marines found the bodies of 58 men and 14 women after a clash with a suspected drug cartel near the border with the US state of Texas.

Marines said they took fire as they approached the ranch with ground and air support. They captured one “underage suspect,” but the rest of the surviving gunmen escaped.

An injured Ecuadoran man said to be the sole survivor of the massacre, alerted the military to the killings. He has been placed under federal protection. The man said the group had been kidnapped and killed by members of the Zetas drug gang.

He told officials the gunmen offered to pay the migrants $2,000 a month to work as hitmen, and shot them when they refused. “Preliminary unconfirmed reports suggest (the victims) could have been immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador and Brazil,” a Mexican official said.

If the victims are undocumented migrants, the case “will turn into an emblem of the capacity or incapacity of Mexican officials to face up” to migrant abuses, said Alberto Herrera, local director of Amnesty International.

Around half a million clandestine migrants cross Mexico each year.

Some 10,000 undocumented were abducted in Mexico from September 2008 to February 2009.

Tamaulipas has recently seen scores of brutal clashes between the Gulf drug cartel and its former allies, the Zetas, over control of trafficking routes into the US. The Zetas are comprised of Mexican military deserters and corrupt former police officers. The US calls them the most dangerous organised crime syndicate in Mexico.

The governor Nuevo Leon state Rodrigo Medina plans to give state police officers a 20% pay rise to deter them from joining drug gangs. It would only be given to officers who passed “confidence control checks” proving they had no links to drug gangs.

Medina said state police officers earn 8,800 pesos ($687) a month.

The announcement comes days after seven local officers were arrested for allegedly working for the Zetas drug gang and helping kidnap and assassinate mayor Edelmiro Cavazos last week.