A narco-terrorist organization, the Gulf Cartel, kidnapped three innocent laborers after mistaking them for rivals. The case turned fatal when one of the kidnapping victims died in a car crash along with two cartel gunmen who were moving him.
The kidnapping occurred earlier this month in Ciudad Victoria, where a team of gunmen kidnapped Cesar Nicolas Cepeda, Hector Rolando Posada, and Francisco Hernandez. On June 18, the cartel gunmen held them for several days. Law enforcement sources revealed to Breitbart Texas that the gunmen mistook the laborers for hitmen, questioned them to get information out of them, and even accused them of trying to kill a priest.
On June 23, after torturing the victims for several days, the gunmen loaded them into an SUV and moved them to a rural area — presumably to kill them — when they crashed, and their vehicle rolled over. During the crash, Posada and Hernandez were ejected from the vehicle. At the same time, Cepeda and two of his captors remained inside the vehicle as it caught fire, killing them.
The fatal kidnappings come at a time when the Gulf Cartel faction from Matamoros has been sending teams of gunmen to Ciudad Victoria in an attempt to take control of the central part of the state away from the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas. Since the inauguration of current Tamaulipas governor Americo Villarreal into power last October, cartel violence escalated dramatically along the main cities in Tamaulipas, including Ciudad Victoria, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, and San Fernando. In those cities, federal, military, and state police forces rarely interfere in cartel turf wars. This gives criminal organizations almost complete impunity.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to Mexico City and the states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas, including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and their original Spanish. This article was written by “Francisco Morales” from Tamaulipas.