Mexico City: Six migrants died after Mexican soldiers opened fire on a fleeing truck near the border with Guatemala, Mexico’s Defense Department said Wednesday. The department said in a statement that soldiers reported hearing gunshots as trucks and two other vehicles approached their position Monday night in the southern state of Chiapas, near the city of Huixtla.
Two soldiers opened fire on the truck carrying migrants from Egypt, Nepal, Cuba, India, Pakistan and at least one other country. Soldiers then approached the truck and found four of the migrants dead and 12 injured. Two of the injured later died from their injuries. There was no immediate information on the condition of the other 10. The department did not say whether the migrants died as a result of army fire or whether weapons were found in the truck.
Another 17 migrants were traveling in the truck and were unharmed. The vehicle was transporting a total of 33 migrants. The area is a common smuggling route for migrants, who are often crammed into overcrowded cargo trucks. The department said the two soldiers who opened fire have been relieved of duty pending investigations. In Mexico, any incident involving civilians is subject to civilian prosecution, but soldiers can also face military courts for such crimes.
It is not the first time that Mexican forces have opened fire on vehicles transporting migrants in the area, which is also the subject of turf battles between warring drug cartels. In the same area in 2021, the quasi-military National Guard opened fire on a van carrying migrants, killing one person and wounding four.
Irineo Mujica, a migrant rights activist who has frequently accompanied migrant caravans in that area of Chiapas, said he doubted the migrants or their smugglers would open fire. “It’s really impossible that these people would have been shooting at the army,” Mujica said.
“Most of the time they get by by paying bribes.” If the deaths were the result of army gunfire, as seems likely, it could prove a major embarrassment for newly inaugurated President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office on Tuesday. Although the events took place a couple of hours before Sheinbaum formally assumed the presidency at midnight on Monday, she has followed the example of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in granting the armed forces extraordinary law enforcement powers, state companies, airports and trains. and construction projects.
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