Two shot dead and four injured by Mexican National Guard on a migrant smuggling route near the US border

Mexico’s National Guard fatally shot two Colombians and wounded four others in what the Defense Ministry said was a confrontation near the U.S. border.

The Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said this in a statement statement On Sunday it emerged that all the victims were migrants who had been “caught in the crossfire”. It identified the dead as a 20-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman, and gave the number of injured Colombians as five, not four. There was no immediate explanation for the difference. The victims were identified by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Yuli Vanessa Herrera Marulanda and Ronaldo Andrés Quintero Peñuelas.

Mexico’s Defense Ministry, which controls the National Guard, did not respond Monday to requests for comment on whether the victims were migrantsbut it said that a Colombian who was not injured in the shootings was handed over to immigration officials, suggesting that this was the case.

If they were migrants, it would be the second time in just over a month that military forces in Mexico have opened fire on and killed migrants.

On October 1, the day he becomes president Claudia Sheinbaum As he took office, soldiers opened fire on a truck, killing six migrants in the southern state of Chiapas. That shooting killed an 11-year-old girl from Egypt, her 18-year-old sister and a 17-year-old boy from El Salvador, along with people from Peru and Honduras.

The latest shootings occurred Saturday on a dirt road near Tecate, east of Otay Mesa on the California border, often used by Mexican migrant smugglers, the department said in a statement late Sunday.

The The Ministry of Defense said A militarized National Guard patrol came under fire after spotting two vehicles — a gray pickup and a white SUV — in the area, near an informal border crossing and wind power plant known as La Rumorosa.

One truck took off and escaped. The National Guard opened fire on the other truck, killing two Colombians and wounding four others. There was no immediate information about their conditions and there were no casualties among the guards involved.

A Colombian and a Mexican man were found unharmed at the scene and detained, and the department said officers at the scene found a handgun and several magazines commonly used for assault rifles.

Colombians have sometimes been recruited as gunmen for Mexicans drug cartelswho are also deeply involved in migrant smuggling. But the fact that the survivor was handed over to immigration officials and that the Foreign Relations Department contacted the Colombian consulate suggests they were migrants.

Armed cartels sometimes escort or kidnap migrants as they travel to the U.S. border. One possible scenario was that armed migrant smugglers were in one or both trucks, but the migrants were actually unarmed bystanders.

The Defense Department said the three National Guard officers who opened fire have been removed from duty while the incident is investigated.

Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office on September 30, gave the military an unprecedented role in public life and law enforcement; he created the militarized Guard and used the Combined Armed Forces as the country’s main law enforcement agencies, replacing the police. The Guard has since been placed under the control of the military.

But critics say the military is not trained to do civilian law enforcement work. Moreover, the skewed death toll in such confrontations – where all the dead and injured occur on one side – makes activists suspect that there was actually a confrontation.

For example, the soldiers who opened fire in Chiapas – who have been detained pending charges – claimed they heard “explosions” before opening fire. There are no indications that any weapons were found at the scene.