One of several crime scenes in Reynosa Saturday
Borderland Beat~Last Saturday, the city of Reynosa was again a ghost town of desolate avenues and closed shops. Messages circulating on WhatsApp asking people not to leave their homes and alert their families that the nightmare had begun again.
That day a caravan formed by trucks and sedan cars arrived in Reynosa from RΓo Bravo. Those who were part of the convoy toured four colonies in the east - Almaguer, Lampacitos, Unidad Obrera and Bienestar - shooting at the people they were encountering in their path.
Construction workers, workers repairing the sewer, a young newly graduated nurse, an elderly person who walked under the burning sun (and who was shot in the throat), the owner of a grocery store and a customer who was shopping at the time he passed the hitmen's armed criminal cell.
In total, 14 people whose lives were cut up on the chopping block at the whim of the murderers.
The citizens of Reynosa have learned to live between shootings that are recorded almost every day, at any time. It is common for citizens to check their social networks before leaving home or work, in order to avoid war zones: roads in which persecutions are recorded, or vehicles are burned.
It’s not strange that civilians lose their lives by being caught in the crossfire of the groups that dispute control of that border city.
But nothing like this had ever happened. The hunt for innocent people, without a criminal record or any relationship with organized crime. "Unpublished, unprecedented," said Attorney Irving Barrios.
In April 2017, a former bodyguard who had become leader of the Gulf Cartel, JuliΓ‘n Manuel Loisa Salinas, El Comandante Toro, was killed by the Navy.
Loisa was fleeing for the sixth time from an operation designed to stop him. On that occasion he couldn't escape. The truck in which he was fleeing crashed into a tree: he descended opening fire on the sailors. He was riddled on the spot.
His death unleashed two days of chaos and extreme violence in Reynosa. His men burned shops, cars, buses, cargo trucks. There were 32 blockades in the city.
The Gulf Cartel itself circulated audios ordering people not to leave their homes. There were versions that a group of Cyclones - one of the factions of the cartel - had been sent from Matamoros to take over the city, one of the main drug and migrant crossings: a kidnapping gold mine, "protection fee", hydrocarbon theft and extortion.
Madre Santisima.
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