The Mexican Military Killed a Migrant and His Smuggler at the Border

EL PASO, Texas—A Guatemalan man and his alleged smuggler were killed and four other migrant men injured after Mexican soldiers opened fire on them as they headed towards the border wall near Ciudad Juárez. 

The six men were in an old SUV driving through a dirt road in the middle of the desert between Chihuahua and New Mexico, on the night of October 9, when at least two Mexican army vehicles began to chase them. 

After a few minutes of pursuit, the soldiers began shooting at the vehicle killing two men and injuring the other four, according to Chihuahua state authorities. 

The four survivors fled the scene and arrived at a local convenience store, where they called the police. Authorities say they remain missing and have not been in touch since.  

The area where the shooting happened is a corridor used by human smugglers to move migrants across the border illegally. 

“It’s a place that is under watch, to a point that there was this encounter with soldiers making their rounds. It is a place of illegal transit, a place where we see a lot of movement of migrants and people dedicated to human smuggling,” Chihuahua’s State Attorney General Carlos Manuel Salas said during a press conference on October 10. 

The vehicle in which the migrants and the alleged smuggler were riding had a ladder strapped to the roof, suggesting they had plans to get to the border wall and across into the U.S., according to news reports. 

The dead were identified as Margarito Canto, 45, and Elvis Enriquez Barriento, 27, both Guatemalan nationals. The injured are Raul de Jesus Hernández, 18, from Honduras, Selvin Eduardo García, 18, Carlos Humberto Rodríguez, 19, and Rigoberto González, 28, all from Guatemala, according to Mexican authorities. 

The incident comes as the U.S. and Mexico struggle to contain the surge of migrants reaching the U.S.-Mexico border. Human rights activists have long accused Mexican law enforcement of using excessive force and even extorting and kidnapping migrants.

The bodies of Canto and Barriento remained lying where they were killed for over 20 hours before Mexican authorities could reach them, according to local news reports. It’s unclear why it took so long for authorities to get to the bodies. 

Chihuahua’s General Attorney confirmed the involvement of the Mexican army after the defense secretary first denied the accusations. Later the same day, the Mexican  officers involved turned their official weapons to Chihuahua authorities as an investigation began, although at least one officer went on the lam following the incident, according to press reports. 

The soldiers involved will be investigated by civilian authorities, said Salas. 

This would be at least the second time in three years that a migrant has been shot dead by Mexican military members. An incident in the southern state of Chiapas in 2021 resulted in the death of a Guatemalan after a group of migrants tried to get across a military checkpoint and a soldier started shooting at the vehicle they were in. 

That same year another man, Cristobal Cobreiro, 35, from Cuba was killed by a National Guard officer in the same state in a similar incident, according to a recent investigation by Mexican human rights NGOs. 

In 2021 a group of Mexican state police officers killed and burned the bodies of at least a dozen Guatemalan migrants in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The bodies were found in a burned-out pickup truck in Camargo, just south of the Rio Grande. Twelve state police officers were subsequently charged with homicide. 

The most recent killing comes as Mexico has increasingly relied on the military to police the surging number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border, fueled by a surge of Venezuelans.

During the last week of September, the number of migrant crossings surpassed 8,600 over a single 24-hour period, according to the Department of Homeland Security figures. That’s up from around 3,500 daily border apprehensions in May, after President Biden ended Title 42, the public health emergency policy that allowed immigration authorities to immediately expel asylum seekers into Mexico. 

After the policy’s end, migration numbers plummeted for a few months, before spiking again in August, fueled by misinformation shared online by smuggler networks and the fact that many migrants’ families and friends successfully entered the U.S.