The 2011 Tamaulipas massacre was the mass murder of at least 193 people[1] discovered in mass graves on April 6, 2011.[2] These people were kidnapped from passenger buses. Although not confirmed, some newspapers mention that the body count surpassed 500, but that the state government of Tamaulipas supposedly censored and prevented such publications.[3][4] This is the second mass murder of its kind in the state of Tamaulipas since the massacre of the 72 illegal immigrants by the Mexican Los Zetas gang on August 24, 2010.
Morelos Canseco Gomez, an official in the Tamaulipas State Interior Ministry, said in a radio interview details of these abductions began to emerge in late March, from a bus company and from passengers who had witnessed people being taken off a bus.[5] The first report came on March 25 from a woman in the border city of Matamoros whose husband failed to arrive from San Luis Potosí.[2] There were reports of at least two other buses stopped since then.[2]
Canseco said it appeared to be a new kind of crime, one in which criminals “stop the bus, select passengers, take them hostage.”[5]
They may have been trying to forcibly recruit passengers as foot soldiers, or they may have intended to hold them for ransom, he said.[5] It may also be that the missing men were heading to the United States and that the gangs took them off the bus to extort payment to get them across the border.[5] Other reports, including the interviews of the captured members, indicate that Los Zetas killed the passengers because they believed the passengers were going to be recruited by the Gulf Cartel, their rival drug cartel, and they wanted to prevent that.[6]
Security forces rescued five people being held by a gang, all whom had been kidnapped from a bus, Canseco said.[5] They helped lead the security forces to the mass graves.[5] The mass graves are in La Joya, a rural community outside the city of San Fernando,[7] near where 72 migrants from Central and South America were killed last August.
Eight mass graves were found on April 6 with 59 bodies, and two more on April 8 with 13 more bodies, according to the Tamaulipas Interior Ministry.[8]
The bodies have not yet been identified, and so it has not been confirmed that they were those of other kidnapped bus passengers.[5] Soldiers have arrested 14 people in connection with the mass graves, said Alejandro Poiré, the security spokesman for the Federal Government.[5] There are indications that they could be linked to the Zetas.[9]
On April 10, the Secretariat of National Defense announced the arrest of a person involved in the massacre which provided information for the location of four mass graves, where 16 bodies were found and continued to research and review of those graves.[10]
On April 12, at least 28 more bodies were found.[11] By April 13, 6 more bodies were found.[12]
On April 14, authorities pulled 23 more corpses from a mass grave. Also, sixteen police officers from San Fernando were arrested for allegedly serving as accomplices to members of the drug cartel suspected in the slayings.[13]
On April 21, authorities said the number of bodies rose to to 177, from an earlier estimate of 145.[9]