Seventy-one people have disappeared this year from a troubled stretch of Mexican road that locals call the “highway of death” — including a Texas mom and her two children, officials said.
At least half a dozen of the missing along the highway between Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo at the Mexican border are from the US, authorities said.
On June 13, Gladys Perez Sanchez, of Laredo, Texas, disappeared with her 16-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter while returning from a visit with relatives in Sabina Hidalgo, according to a bulletin issued by the FBI in San Antonio.
The disappearances are believed to be tied to drug gangs in the region, particularly a turf war between the Jalisco and Northeast cartels, said Karla Quintana, head of Mexico’s National Search Commission.
In recent months, about a half-dozen men who were abducted along the highway have resurfaced — badly beaten but alive, activists said.
But Quintana said authorities hold out little hope that most of the missing will be found, given the cartels’ propensity for burning bodies.
She said earlier this week that authorities had found “a place of extermination” farther east where half a ton of bone fragments were dug up.
“It’s no longer between the cartels,” Mexican activist Angelica Orozco told the Associated Press. “They are attacking the public.”
With Post wires
