Photo courtesy of El Sol de Tlaxcala
By H. Nelson Goodson
April 1, 2013
Apizaco, Tlaxcala, Mexico - On Saturday, Tlaxcala state and the Apizaco local authorities began an investigation into the armed robbery of ten undocumented Central Americans, including the murder of two of them traveling from Tierra Blanca, Veracruz in a moving train near the city of Apizaco, El Sol de Tlaxcala reported. Authorities were called to a crime scene at around 6:45 a.m. after five men boarded a freight train in Apizaco with immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras on it and robbed them at gun point. The gunmen ordered the immigrants to give up their cash. They collected between $500 to $1,000 dollars from the victims. Several of the immigrants resisted, Alberto Jorge Mondragón, 37, from Honduras was fatally shot multiple times with an Uzi and another unidentified victim was thrown off the train, who then suffered a severed left leg and arm from the moving train. The other immigrants jumped off the train to save their lives.
Mondragón's body was later identified by his brother, Antonio Jorge Mondragón, according to El Sol de Tlaxcala.
In an unrelated homicide, Kelvin Saúl Cruz, 22, from Honduras was fatally shot on early Thursday at the Chontalpa train station in the municipality of Huimanguillo in the state of Tabasco, Ruben Figueroa, an immigrant rights activist from the Mesoamerican Immigrant Movement reported. Several other immigrants were also reported injured, but are expected to survive. Figueroa says, it's the current violence perpetuated in the Tenosique, Tabasco-Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz freight train route against undocumented immigrants traveling through Mexico on their way to the U.S. border. Members of an organized criminal operation affiliated with the Zetas rob or collect a fee between $100 to $300 dollars from each immigrant to ride the freight train. If immigrants fail to pay a fee, they are thrown off the moving train known as "La Bestia/Beast, the train of death."
The Tabasco-Veracruz based criminal organization operates a multimillion dollar transportation and smuggling routes of undocumented immigrants (human trafficking) who often become victims of violence, rape, murder, kidnappings, prostitution rings, drug trafficking and armed robbery.
In last six years, 70,000 undocumented immigrants from South and Central American have disappeared while traveling through Mexico on their way to the U.S. and only 80 immigrants have been located alive, according to Figueroa.
The train route between Tenosique to Veracruz is known for the massive immigrant killings and disposing of their bodies in hundreds of clandestine grave sites. Only a portion of those graves have been uncovered by Mexican authorities.
In some municipalities, hundreds of unidentified corpses have been buried by local authorities in unmarked graves.
