3/6/23

By Josh Rubin

Have you been to Matamoros?

It is over an international bridge from Brownsville, Texas. As far as I can tell, it is the southernmost spot on the land border between our two countries. It is a place that migrants are drawn to on their journeys, whether from parts of Mexico itself or from the many places people are leaving to find a way for them and their families to survive. Migrants find themselves stranded there, following the changing rules about how to get into the United States. And the rules change often, lately making it harder and harder to cross that fateful river.

It is also one of the most dangerous places on earth.

Yesterday I watched a video that was filmed on a phone in Matamoros. I do not know who filmed it, and if I knew I wouldn’t tell you. In the video, bodies of dead people were dragged along the street and loaded on the back bed of a pickup truck. Bodies are heavy, and each one needed two men to wrangle their lifeless corpses. A woman, still alive, was directed to climb in, as well.

All indications are that these bodies were migrants. Messages that flew on the internet suggest that the dominant cartel in Matamoros, the cartel del golfo, and a neighborhood subgroup, the grupo escorpión, were responsible for the slaughter. My suspicion is that the murdered men were involved in smuggling people across, a business that the cartel enforces as a monopoly of their own.

The US consulate announced a little while later that a van with four people from our side was stopped in a kidnapping. Unrelated, they say.

Along the river, the one known from the south as Río Bravo and from the north as the Rio Grande, tarps are strung together to provide a little shelter for the migrants arriving from their wasted homelands. They wait there, huddled close.