President Claudia Sheinbaum addressed questions Tuesday about accusations that military soldiers and National Guard members were involved in the shooting deaths of three civilians over the weekend — including a nurse and a child — in two incidents in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas.
According to media reports, all the victims died in the crossfire of two different shootouts in Nuevo Laredo between patrols and suspected members of criminal groups.
At her Tuesday morning press conference, Sheinbaum confirmed the three civilian deaths, adding that a member of the military was also killed in the incident on Friday in which a nurse was killed.
The other incident, on Saturday, involved the National Guard, Sheinbaum confirmed, and resulted in the deaths of two civilians, one of whom was a young girl. Both cases were under investigation by the federal Attorney General’s Office, she said.
She did not give any details about the third civilian victim.
Nuevo Laredo, a border city with Laredo, Texas, has been the site in multiple incidents involving civilians killed in encounters with military forces serving as law enforcement. The military and the National Guard are both under the supervision of the Defense Ministry.
In the Friday incident, a family found itself on a road where the military was pursuing suspects’ vehicles in a car chase after having been fired upon, Sheinbaum said.
Víctor Carrillo Martínez told local media that his wife, Yuricie Rivera Elizalde, was killed in the crossfire by a bullet to the head. According to reports, Martínez said medical personnel who attended to Rivera, a nurse, told him, “They were large-caliber bullets used by soldiers.”
Carillo also told reporters that the soldiers involved in the incident did not stop to help and simply drove on.
In the Saturday incident, Lidia Galván Reséndezan and her 8-year-old granddaughter were driving to a stationery store when they were caught in the middle of a car chase between National Guard officers and a suspect. The 8-year-old, identified by the Expansión media outlet as Lidia Iris, was shot in the head and died soon after arriving at a hospital.
Galván told reporters that her car got trapped between a military vehicle and an SUV when authorities opened fire.
The Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee (CDHNL), a local NGO, released a statement on Sunday, saying that another civilian had been killed during another car chase in the city involving the military. Sheinbaum did not confirm a third incident, so it isn’t clear if the death referred to by the human rights group was the other death she acknowledged had happened in the Saturday incident with the National Guard.
A history of violence
Nuevo Laredo has suffered repeated violence over the last several years under the presence of the Northeast Cartel, an offshoot of another criminal group, Los Zetas. The government has responded to the violence with regular military and National Guard patrols.
The cartel has a strong presence in Nuevo Laredo and has been accused of killing several police officers across the northern states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León in recent years. The cartel and other organized crime groups in the northern border regions of Mexico profit from the smuggling to the U.S. of drugs and migrants.
Government response
President Sheinbaum emphasized at her Tuesday press conference that “it is very important to say that Nuevo Laredo is where criminal groups have carried out the most attacks on the army and the National Guard.”
She also said that if any members of the Guard or army were found to have acted badly, they would face consequences.
The Defense Ministry (Sedena) has yet to comment on the incidents.
Multiple accusations of wrongdoing
The military has been implicated in previous killings of civilians, most recently at the beginning of October, six migrants were killed in the southern state of Chiapas, after the Mexican army opened fire on vehicles that were attempting to evade military personnel carrying out patrols.
Sedena released a statement afterward saying that the soldiers claimed they’d heard shots and opened fire on a truck that turned out to be carrying migrants from Egypt, Nepal, Cuba, India, Pakistan and El Salvador. Four of the migrants were found dead and 12 wounded.
The military and the Guard also have a controversial history, particularly in Nuevo Laredo, where in 2023, a Guard patrol in Nuevo Laredo allegedly killed two civilians in a car for no apparent reason. At the time, CDHNL president Raymundo Ramos claimed that a Guard artilleryman shot at the vehicle 86 times. Also last year, 16 army soldiers were caught on video in Nuevo Laredo shooting five disarmed suspects execution-style.
The National Guard: blurring lines between civilian and military
Shortly before leaving office, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Morena Party succeeded in pushing through a new constitutional reform that put the Guard permanently under Sedena’s control, further blurring the lines between the civilian and military forces in Mexico, as the Guard is Mexico’s federal police force.
Since its creation, the Guard has been used in every state in Mexico to patrol civilian public spaces, including airports and federal highways, but also more local spaces such as bus stations. They also assist state and local law enforcement in responding to more serious crimes, usually involving illicit drug trafficking, people smuggling and fuel theft.
The constitutional reform was widely criticized by those who say it violates Mexico’s constitution and that the military is not adequately trained to do civilian law enforcement.
With reports from AP News, El Financiero and The Washington Post.
