US citizen among bus passengers abducted in Mexico

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Associated Press:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — At least one U.S. citizen was among dozens of men reportedly forced off passenger buses by armed attackers in the northeastern border state of Tamaulipas, where 72 bodies were found in mass graves last week, U.S. officials said Sunday.

The man has yet to be located, said a warden's message posted on the website of the consulate, which is located in the Tamaulipas city of Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas.
It is not unusual for people living or working in Mexican border states to have been born in the U.S.

In a separate warden's message issued Friday, the consulate had warned that Mexican criminal gangs may be planning attacks "in the near future" against U.S. law enforcement or U.S. citizens in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and San Luis Potosi, three northern states wracked by drug violence as cartels battle for territory.

The report said the information was uncorroborated but was being distributed to all U.S. employees in those three states. There was no mention of closing consulates or sending State Department workers out of the country.


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What is going to be the body count before we step in?

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How would you react if you saw severed heads in your neighborhood?

 

As violence in the cartel wars grows worse in Mexico, more and more Mexican families are sending their children to school in the United States. For school officials in border districts, this means having to deal more and more with children suffering severe mental and emotional trauma from the horrors they’ve witnessed. In the El Paso Independent School District, counselor Susan Crews describes having to deal with children who’ve been through Hell:

 

In border cities, it’s common for students from Mexico to go to school in the U.S. Some were born in the U.S. but raised in Mexico, and their families feel they’ll have better opportunities if they go to an American school.

 

But in recent years, motivation to cross the border has changed. Horrific drug-related violence in Mexico is forcing some families to flee, often in a hurry.

 

Susan Crews, lead counselor for the El Paso Independent School District, has seen what witnessing that violence can do to a child.

 

“I have students whose mothers have been decapitated,” Crews says. “I have a student in one of the middle schools — when he visited his family in Juarez there were three heads on sticks along the path were he goes.”

 

Crews is a grandmotherly figure who wears her hair in a bow-shaped bun atop her head. She says never in her 43 years as a counselor has she encountered such hellish stories.

 

“The counselor had contacted me because this eighth-grader was having a trauma reaction,” Crews says. “He was not able to control his bladder; he was not sleeping at night.”

 

Crews is the woman the district sends when there’s a major trauma at a school. In the past two years, she’s responded to the deaths of four students — all killed in Mexico.

 

“My experience has been atrocious,” she says. “I mean it’s just been overwhelming in my opinion.”

 

Perhaps a measure of the scale of the problem, Ft. Hood in El Paso has been offering training in counseling those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — the kind they offer to soldiers returning from a war.

 

And now children from Mexico.

 

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