Mexico searches for 80 migrants pulled from a train by gunmen

Mexican law-enforcement authorities on Tuesday were trying to confirm a report that masked gunmen kidnapped at least 80 undocumented Central American migrants, including children, who had boarded a freight train in Mexico in a bid to travel to the United States.

The incident was reported by Father Alejandro Solalinde, who runs a shelter for undocumented migrants called the Brothers Along the Road hostel, in the southwestern state of Oaxaca. Solalinde told the media that a dozen gunmen on Friday seized the migrants trying to make it toward the US border.

"At least 60 or 80 people, if not more, were kidnapped" from the freight train, Solalinde said, adding that women and children were among those snatched.

Prosecutors in Veracruz and Oaxaca states said that they had no information about the case but were investigating. Some of the migrants who had apparently escaped from the train were to give statements to prosecutors on Tuesday.

According to Solalinde, some 250 migrants were aboard the train when the gunmen climbed aboard in a rural area of southeastern Mexico, Solalinde said. Most of them were from Guatemala and Honduras.

The train, which left the Oaxaca city of Ixtepec for the eastern state of Veracruz, was stopped by the gunmen after about four hours, according to Solalinde, who saw several Central Americans at his hostel on that day.

"Before arriving at the Medias Aguas station in Veracruz, the driver stopped the train when the tracks were blocked by three trucks with armed men" who seized the migrants, Solalinde told AFP. "The armed men stepped out of the trucks and after threatening the migrants with firearms, they forced them off the train" and onto the trucks.

Illegal migrants, mostly from Central America, use the train to reach the US border, along with Mexicans from the southern part of the country seeking a better life in the United States.

In August 2010, a total of 72 undocumented Central and South American migrants, mostly from El Salvador and Ecuador, were kidnapped and killed in Tamaulipas, north of Veracruz en route to the US border, a crime the government has attributed to Los Zetas drug cartel.

In another case, police announced the capture on June 21 of the leader of the rival La Family cartel José de Jesús Méndez Vargas, known as El Chango (Monkey).

Police arrested Méndez in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes without firing a shot, Mexico's national security spokesman Alejandro Poire said in a statement. Méndez became the head of the vicious cartel seven months after killing its founder, authorities say.