Search for more than 20 missing persons in north-central Mexico

The authorities of the central-north states of Mexico were searching by land and air on Thursday for more than 20 people who were traveling in two trucks and who disappeared as they passed through the state of San Luis Potosí and who had been kidnapped.

Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, Secretary of Security of Guanajuanto, the state from which the two vehicles departed, reported almost at midnight on Wednesday that two helicopters “with high technology and infrared vision and instruments for night flight” joined the authorities of the neighboring state. of San Luis Potosí to track down the disappeared.

The vehicle rental and tourism services company Grupo Eifel denounced on Tuesday the alleged kidnapping of more than 20 people, including two of its employees, who were traveling in company vans bound for Saltillo, in the border state of Coahuila.

As explained to Associated Press the company’s legal representative, Adrián González, the group of adult men had left San Felipe, in the violent state of Guanajuato, on Monday morning in a van with capacity for 15 people and another for six passengers, the first of which had GPS.

In the early hours of Tuesday they realized that the vehicle with the locator was stopped near the neighboring state of San Luis Potosí, which worried the company. Not being able to contact the drivers, the alarm grew.

González explained that one of his brothers received a call from the person who contracted the service -and that he was one of the passengers- in which he said that organized crime individuals had captured them and that they were asking for 60,000 pesos (about 3,000 dollars) for each one to release them. He also told her that the drivers were kept in a separate place.

González, who said he did not know what the person who hired his services was doing, filed a complaint on Tuesday with the Guanajuato prosecutor’s office and then contacted the National Guard, which that same day located one of the trucks in Matehuala, in San Luis Potosí, but without anyone on board, according to the report of this military body that González shared with PA.

Guanajuato’s government secretary, Lidia Dennise García, indicated the day before that the state was “in coordination with authorities from San Luis Potosí” to locate the disappeared.

Kidnappings and disappearances are relatively frequent on the roads in many areas of Mexico, especially when traveling at night, since these are the hours of operation for criminal groups.

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