Global Courant 2023-05-12 09:03:02
MEXICO CITY — Prosecutors in Mexico said Thursday they have arrested two more men in the March 3 kidnapping of four Americans and the murder of two of them.
The Gulf drug cartel turned five men over to police shortly after the kidnapping in the border town of Matamoros, and prosecutors said the two newly arrested suspects also appeared to be members of the same cartel.
The two were arrested on Sunday during raids in the northern border state of Tamaulipas and flown to Mexico City on a military plane. It was not immediately clear why the arrests were not announced at the time.
Federal prosecutors have not provided the suspects’ full names, but the details and given names match two men listed in a federal database as having been arrested in Tamaulipas that day. Those names – Axel Alfredo Cárdenas and Alan Alexis Cárdenas – suggest they are related to Osiel Cárdenas Guillen, the leader of the Gulf Cartel who was captured in 2003.
Prosecutors confirmed that the two were sons of Osiel Cardenas’ cousin, José Alfredo Cárdenas Martínez, who was arrested in 2022. They also said the pair took on a leadership role in the cartel after their father’s arrest.
The two reportedly led the gangs of cartel gunmen known as the Scorpions and the Cyclones. They were caught in an early morning raid, during which police found six guns and more than a thousand doses of “synthetic drugs,” a term used in Mexico to refer to methamphetamine or fentanyl.
The statement did not specify charges against the men, but said they were involved in drug and migrant smuggling, kidnapping and extortion in the Matamoros area.
In March, less than a week after the kidnappings, a letter purporting to be from the Scorpions faction of the Gulf Cartel condemned the violence, saying the gang had turned over its own members responsible to authorities. A Mexican woman was also killed in the March 3 shootings.
“We have decided to extradite those directly involved and responsible in the events, who at all times acted according to their own decision-making and lack of discipline,” the letter reads, adding that those individuals had gone against the rules of the cartel . including “respect for the life and well-being of the innocent”.
Five men were found tied up along with the letter in one of the vehicles that authorities were looking for.
The four Americans came to Matamoros from Texas so that one of them could have cosmetic surgery. Around noon they were fired upon in the center of Matamoros and then loaded into a pickup truck.
Americans Zindell Brown and Shaeed Woodard were killed in the attack; Eric Williams and Latavia McGee survived. Most of them had grown up together in the small town of Lake City, South Carolina.
A Mexican woman, Areli Pablo Servando, 33, was also killed, apparently by a stray bullet.
