Authorities in Oaxaca rescued 41 migrants who were being held against their will at a house in the state capital. Three people were detained at the same address.
The Oaxaca Attorney General’s Office (FGEO) said Friday that police freed 35 migrants from India, five from Nepal and one from Ecuador.
They had been locked in rooms inside the house for an unspecified period of time.
The FGEO said in a statement that police carried out an operation in the San Martín Mexicapan area of Oaxaca city after receiving a report from a citizen about a “man seeking help because he was kidnapped along with his wife and young son.”
Their captors were seeking “a large sum of money to release them,” the FGEO added.
The Attorney General’s Office didn’t say whether the man, woman and boy were among the 41 migrants who were rescued. However, a photo included in the FGEO statement showed a young child standing next to a police officer and a woman on her knees, apparently being arrested.
It said that police arrested two men and one woman at the house. They were turned over to the “appropriate authority to determine their legal situation,” the FGEO said.
The migrants were given medical checks and then taken to accommodation, the FGEO said.
“The State Attorney General’s Office is committed to attending to citizens’ complaints and carrying out corresponding investigations in order to provide effective results in the pursuit of justice, especially in cases of high impact crimes such as kidnapping,” the FGEO said.
Large numbers of migrants enter Mexico via the country’s southern border with Guatemala before attempting to travel through the country to the northern border.
Most are from Central America, South America and Caribbean countries such as Haiti and Cuba, but people from further afield, including African and Asian countries, have also entered Mexico from Guatemala in recent years.
The National Immigration Institute (INM) said in June that almost 1.4 million undocumented foreigners were detected traveling in Mexico without entry authorization in the first five months of the year.
According to the INM, citizens from 177 countries — or around 90% of the world’s nations — were detected traveling irregularly through Mexico between January and May. The agency said that those people came from “the five continents” of the world,” but the majority left other countries in the Americas.
Mexico News Daily
