Soldiers wanted for the killing of five civilians in Mexico last month were arrested on Wednesday, the country’s president said, after video footage of the alleged “executions” was made public.
A Spanish newspaper and a US broadcaster released surveillance footage of five men beaten and shot in the northwestern city of Nuevo Laredo, near the US border, in a region hit hard by criminal violence.
“It appears that there have been executions and this cannot be allowed,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at his daily press conference. The suspects are in custody, he added.
The country i Univision released footage of an incident on May 18 in which soldiers apparently beat and shot at a group of men on the side of the road.
Security video footage shows soldiers shooting five men after a street chase in Nuevo Laredo, northern Mexico. The army denies it is a case of extrajudicial killings and says the civilians were armed and part of organized crime. https://t.co/aod7SFXkoN
— El País English Edition (@elpaisinenglish) June 7, 2023
The footage begins with a pickup truck, apparently involved in a chase, crashing into a perimeter wall at high speed. Next, an armored car with a roof-mounted machine gun crashes into the side of the truck.
A dozen soldiers surround the crashed vehicle before removing five men. The soldiers then kick and beat the men, who are tied up and thrown to the ground.
Soldiers are seen returning fire after appearing to be attacked by gunmen who cannot be seen in the footage. A soldier is then seen shooting the five. Four of them died at the scene, according to Univision.
An ambulance arrived an hour later for the fifth man, but he died on the way to hospital, the station added.
Officials said in a news release that Mexican prosecutors and the military are investigating.
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University who studies the border, told the AP that the soldiers were apparently trying to alter the crime scene to make it look like there had been an armed confrontation.
“It seems that the intention was to leave these bodies with weapons so that it looks like a confrontation between armed groups of civilians, as has happened before,” said Correa-Cabrera.
The killings appear to cast doubt on López Obrador’s strategy of relying almost exclusively on the military to enforce the law.
“It is clear that the armed forces have been involved in the security of this city, and also that this city has never been made safe,” he said. “As long as we have troopers doing (law enforcement) work on the streets, this will continue to happen.”
The incident would be at least the second case of apparently extrajudicial killings in Nuevo Laredo this year. On February 26, the soldiers killed five young men who were in a vehicle.
JASIEL RUBIO/REUTERS
The men were apparently unarmed and in a report, Mexico’s government human rights agency said the soldiers had fired at the vehicle without verbally ordering it to stop. Angry neighbors attacked the soldiers, beating some of them.
In April, federal prosecutors charged four soldiers involved with manslaughter.
That same month, a human rights organization in Nuevo Laredo sent a formal complaint to López Obrador. In it, a man said Mexican National Guard troops had fired on his vehicle in Nuevo Laredo, killing his pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend and a 54-year-old friend, and wounding two others. A law enforcement crime scene report on the incident largely corroborated the account of the shooting contained in the complaint.
López Obrador claims the military has changed and has tried to describe incidents like the most recent killings as isolated acts by bad soldiers, but that doesn’t convince many.
“This does not seem like a mistake,” said Correa-Cabrera. “Here, this looks very organized.”
Nuevo Laredo is a city dominated by the Northeast drug cartel, and shootouts between cartel gunmen and soldiers or rival gangs are common.
In December, seven suspected cartel gunmen and a soldier killed in a shootout between the military and gang members in Nuevo Laredo.
In March 2022, the The US authorized the departure of the families and some consulate personnel after drug cartel gunmen opened fire on the US consulate building in Nuevo Laredo. At the time, the US State Department also advised US citizens do not travel to Tamaulipas, the state where Nuevo Laredo is located, citing crime and safety issues.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
