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The Tamaulipas State Prosecutor’s Office said the bodies were found along a dirt road near the town of Camargo.
Mexican authorities say they found 19 dead and burned bodies near a town across the Rio Grande from the US state of Texas, in an area that has seen violent territorial disputes between organized crime groups in recent years. years.
The Tamaulipas State Prosecutor’s Office said on Saturday evening that the bodies were discovered along a dirt road outside Camargo after residents reported a burning vehicle.
Authorities found two vehicles on fire, containing the remains of 19 victims. Rifles were also found.
All 19 victims were shot, but the shells were not found at the site, leading investigators to believe they had been killed elsewhere.
“In one of the vans, there were two bodies in the front seats, another on the driver’s door side, another on the passenger door side and 15 bodies in the rear of the vehicle,” a statement from the State police read.
“The first investigations show that the death was caused by projectiles from firearms, then [the victims] were set on fire, ”he added.
A Camargo official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, said the killings took place on Friday, but people were afraid to report them.
A separate source from the prosecutor’s office told AFP news agency that an investigation has been launched to determine whether the victims were undocumented, as some local media reported.
The official said they had contacted Guatemalan consular authorities in Mexico “to provide the necessary information and try to identify some of those suspected of being Guatemalan migrants”.
Camargo, a city of about 15,000 people, borders Texas and the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon.
Drug cartels
The authorities in Nuevo Leon are cooperating with the prosecutor’s office in Tamaulipas.
The region experiences frequent clashes between the Noreste cartel, which controls part of Nuevo Leon, and the Gulf cartel, which has been active in Tamaulipas for decades.
In January 2019, in the town of Tamaulipas in Miguel Aleman, 24 corpses were found, 15 of which were charred.
In August 2010, a group of 72 undocumented migrants were killed in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. Authorities said the massacre was carried out by the Zetas cartel, one of the most powerful at the time.
Tamaulipas, on the Mexican Gulf Coast, is the shortest route to the United States, but also the most dangerous due to the presence of criminal gangs, which kidnap, extort and murder migrants.
Mexico recorded 34,523 assassinations in 2020, a slight drop from the figure of 34,608 in 2019, which was a record since official counts began.
Cartel-related violence has raged in Mexico since 2006, with more than 300,000 murders since.
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