Mexican soldiers opened fire on a vehicle in the northern border state of Tamaulipas on Monday night, killing six people and wounding two others.
All of the victims were reportedly farmworkers.
The Ministry of National Defense (Defensa) announced the incident on Tuesday, saying in a statement that military personnel were traveling in three vehicles on the Ciudad Mante-Tampico highway when a white truck “attempted to ram” one of the army vehicles.
“Upon perceiving a risk to their physical safety and after some maneuvers, … [the soldiers] made use of their weapons and unfortunately five people lost their lives and three others were injured,” Defensa said.
The Defense Ministry said that the injured were given first aid and “expeditiously evacuated” to a hospital in Tampico, a city in southern Tamaulipas.
“During the transfer to the hospital, one of the wounded persons died,” Defensa said.
The Defense Ministry said that the Federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) was “immediately” notified of the incident and began an investigation.
It said that military prosecutors also opened an investigation into the killing of the six people. The soldiers involved in the incident on the Ciudad Mante-Tampico highway were relieved of their duties and presented to FGR offices in Tampico, Defensa said.
The ministry didn’t say whether the victims were armed. Their identities have not been publicly disclosed.
At her Wednesday morning press conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum said that the actions of the soldiers involved in the “very regrettable” incident will be “completely” reviewed.
Asked whether the army still has instructions to not attack “the civilian population” and whether an army commander had made “a mistake” in ordering troops to open fire, Sheinbaum responded:
“We need to review what happened first, in order to have all the information about what occurred. … The use of a firearm has to be rational; there is a law that establishes under what conditions.”
Sheinbaum subsequently asserted that her government isn’t carrying out a “war” against drug cartels like that waged by the administration of former president Felipe Calderón.
During Calderón’s 2006-12 government, “the order was to shoot” at suspected criminals, she said, adding that federal security forces now only respond with force if there is an attack against them first.
Still, during the Sheinbaum administration, the military has been more willing to combat criminal threats with force than during the 2018-24 government of ex-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Last month, the United States Ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, asserted that the Sheinbaum administration has made a “bold change” in security strategy in Mexico by ramping up operations against drug cartels. The president disagreed with his view.
An army ‘mistake’?
The newspaper El País reported on Wednesday that it was told by “official sources” that the army killed the six civilians in Tamaulipas “by mistake.”
El País noted that local media outlets have reported that the victims were jornaleros —day laborers who commonly work on farms.
The newspaper said that military investigations in cases involving the army often become “the basis” of FGR investigations, allowing military prosecutors to “frame the event according to their vision.”
The Centro Prodh human rights organization said on social media on Tuesday that it was concerning that “parallel investigations in the military jurisdiction” continued to be opened in “cases of probable serious violations of human rights.”
Centro Prodh also said that the killing of the six people in Tamaulipas was an “undeniable consequence of the deepening of military power” in Mexico.
Sheinbaum-era precedents
In May, two girls were killed by soldiers in Badiraguato, Sinaloa.
“Family members of Alexa and Leidy, girls aged seven and 11, … reported that both were murdered by army officers in a direct attack on the vehicle in which they were traveling with their family,” the news outlet Animal Político reported.
El País reported that, as was the case in Tamaulipas on Monday, “the army didn’t point to any attack against it” before soldiers opened fire.
On Oct. 1, 2024 — the day Sheinbaum was sworn in as president — soldiers killed six migrants in Chiapas. According to the Defense Ministry, the soldiers opened fire on vehicles that attempted to evade military personnel carrying out patrols on a highway north of the city of Tapachula.
Ten other migrants were injured in the incident. Defensa indicated that soldiers mistook the migrants for criminals.
Two days after the incident, Sheinbaum said that “a situation like this can’t be repeated.”
With reports from El País
