Around one hundred families from Ciudad Mier camped down in an improvised hostel in the nearby town of Miguel Aleman, between the border cities of Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, across from Texas.
“We know there are more who have paid to rent houses,” Mayor Servando Lopez told journalists, adding that the families started arriving last weekend.
Gunmen have killed so many police and local officials in some areas bordering Texas that few are willing to take the posts anymore, leading a number of women to occupy roles traditionally dominated by men.
Media reports said the exodus was provoked by threatening messages from the Zetas drug gang following the death of a leader of the rival Gulf gang, Ezequiel Cardenas, or “Tony Tormenta,” in a shootout with the military last week in the border city of Matamoros. The Gulf gang has been fighting brutal turf battles with its former allies the Zetas in the region this year.
La Jornada daily said soldiers had evacuated some 350 inhabitants of Ciudad Mier and the neighboring town of Camargo, citing military and legal sources.
The Defense Ministry could not immediately confirm the report.
Meanwhile, in Mexico’s northern murder capital Ciudad Juarez, two newspaper photographers left the city “for good” after receiving death threats, their employer Diario de Chihuahua said.
The death threats followed Monday’s publication of pictures the reporters took of a man killed in a car crash, who police identified as a member of one of the two drug cartels fighting for control of lucrative drug smuggling corridors to the United States.
Ciudad Juarez, located 550 kilometers northwest from Nuevo Laredo, has also seen an exodus of residents as the drug violence spirals out of control — more than 2,700 murders so far this year.
At least 12 journalists have been killed in Mexico this year, according to Reporters Without Borders, making it the most dangerous country for media workers of all Latin America.
More than 28,000 people have died in a wave of suspected drug violence across Mexico since 2006, despite a military clampdown on organized crime involving some 50,000 troops.
