World

Reports: At least 142 go missing at border

MONTERREY, Mexico - At least 27 U.S. citizens and 115 Mexicans have been abducted or vanished along the Texas-Mexico border in recent months amid a war for control of the cross-border drug trade, officials and rights groups say. Some of those abducted are later slain, and many have links to a battle between drug gangs over control of the lucrative trade in cocaine, amphetamine and marijuana. But an increasing number of bystanders have been caught up in the crime surge, which triggered a diplomatic dispute between Mexico City and Washington after the U.S. ambassador said Mexican police were losing the battle against crime along the border. Meanwhile, the FBI has done a quick about-face from the warning it sent to federal law enforcement agencies that a Mexican drug cartel was poised to send armed gangsters to kidnap and murder two U.S. federal agents. The FBI's San Antonio office issued the bulletin Friday but backed away from it Monday after an investigation found no evidence to support the plot. "Information was received, and after intense efforts to corroborate it, it was determined the information was not viable," said Rene Salinas, FBI spokesman in San Antonio. 23 vanish in Nuevo Laredo

The 27 Americans vanished since last August while visiting three cities on the Mexican side of the border, according to the FBI. By comparison, the U.S. consul in Laredo said previously that only three or four abductions were reported each year. Twenty-three of the disappearances occurred in Nuevo Laredo, a key trade hub south of Laredo, Texas, with two more in both Matamoros, south of Brownsville, and Piedras Negras, a desert town across from Eagle Pass. Special agent Salinas of the FBI's San Antonio field office said the "majority of the victims were involved one way or another in the drug trade." Twelve of the Americans have since been released, two on payment of a ransom. Several others who disappeared had no links to organized criminal bands in the cities and "just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," he added. In Mexico, rights groups say more than 115 people have been kidnapped in the border state of Tamaulipas during the period, more than 70 of them in two mass abductions believed to have been carried out by enforcers for a local drug cartel.