Gunmen kidnap US citizens who crossed into Mexico to buy medicine

Gunmen kidnapped four US citizens who crossed into Mexico from Texas last week to buy medicine and got caught in a shootout that killed at least one Mexican citizen, officials said on Monday.

The four were in a white minivan with North Carolina license plates. They came under fire on Friday shortly after entering the city of Matamoros from Brownsville, the southernmost tip of Texas near the Gulf coast, the FBI San Antonio division office said in a statement on Sunday.

The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said on Monday that the four were going to buy medicine and ended up in the crossfire between two armed groups, without offering details.

A video posted to social media on Friday shows armed men, some wearing tan body armor, who load four people into the bed of a pickup truck in broad daylight. One was alive and sitting up, but the others appeared to be either dead or wounded.

Matamoros is home to warring factions of the Gulf drug cartel as leadership changes have led to bloody infighting. Amid the violence, thousands of Mexicans have disappeared.

Shootouts there on Friday were so bad that the US consulate issued an alert about the danger and local authorities warned people to shelter in place. It was not immediately clear how the abductions could have been connected to that violence Friday.

Joe Biden had been informed of the situation, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Monday. She declined to answer other questions, citing privacy concerns.

Victims of violence in Matamoros and other large border cities of Tamaulipas often go uncounted, because the cartels have a history of taking bodies of their own with them. Local media often avoid reporting on such incidents out of safety concerns, creating an information vacuum.

Their positions appeared to correspond with the video posted online which showed them being dragged across the street and loaded into the bed of a white pickup.

But increased cartel violence over the past 10 to 15 years frightened away much of that business. Sometimes US citizens are swept up in the violence.