Cartel Gunmen Arrested After Crashing into Mexican Army Convoy in Border State

Mexican Army soldiers arrested a group of cartel gunmen who crashed into their convoy a few miles south of the Texas border. After the crash, the soldiers found the bodies of four gunmen in the back of the vehicle that had been killed in an earlier shootout between rival cartels. It appears military forces did not play a role in the gunmen’s deaths.

The crash occurred on Tuesday morning just south of Miguel Aleman, Tamaulipas, a city bordering Roma, Texas. Mexican authorities have tried to downplay the crash in an attempt to divert attention away from the almost daily large-scale shootouts between rival cartel gunmen in the northern part of the country that are ignored by authorities.

The soldiers were not patrolling the region but were escorting a group of workers from Mexico’s state-owned oil company PEMEX. In recent years, government officials have deployed military forces to protect Pemex workers and oil lines in an attempt to keep drug cartels from stealing fuel. It was during one of those details that a convoy of Mexican soldiers collided with a pickup truck that was towing a trailer, law enforcement sources revealed to Breitbart Texas.

When the soldiers got out of their vehicles to check for injuries they found four bodies in the bed of the pickup and arrested a total of 13 men hiding under a tarp in a trailer, the soldiers also arrested the driver, who was identified as 25-year-old Luis Eduardo Ruiz Perez. The main claimed that the gunmen forced him to drive them, however, authorities believe that Ruiz Perez was in fact part of the cartel group.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com. 

Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.