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On July 9, 2011, alleged gunmen of the Gulf Cartel kidnapped 18 members of the Cázares family from three different households in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico. The children and women were eventually released three days later, but the abductors kept five men. Forty-eight hours later, the Gulf Cartel contacted the members who had been released to start negotiating ransom. After several days of negotiation and three different ransom payments, the Cázares were called to deliver their final payment on July 27. They sent the money to the kidnappers and waited in a disclosed location for a white van the kidnappers had pledged to deliver their remaining family members. However, the van never arrived and the phone the kidnappers used to contact the Cázares went out of service. The family then decided to contact authorities and open the case. The Cázares men have been missing ever since. The mass kidnapping of the Cázares family stands out from other abduction cases in Mexico because all the eighteen victims were related. Among them were three U.S. citizens. The family has sent letters to officials in the lowest and highest levels of the Mexican government and has reached out to international heads of state for assistance on the case. The kidnapping is currently unsolved; the whereabouts of the five remaining abductees and the motives behind the kidnapping are officially unknown. Federal sources, however, agree that the kidnapping was masterminded by the top echelons of the Gulf Cartel. ==Kidnapping== At around 5:00 a.m. on July 9, 2011, at least eight alleged gunmen of the Gulf Cartel entered the first domicile of the Cázares family in neighborhood San Francisco in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico to carry out a kidnapping. The first house was owned by Rodolfo Cázares Garza.〔 The kidnappers were wearing military-style uniforms and ski-masks, but the victims noticed that they were sporting white-colored sneakers, speaking vulgarities, and looking for valuable house possessions, which suggested they were not law enforcement or military personnel. They stormed each of the bedrooms in the house to round up the victims before blindfolding them (except for two children). Once the kidnappers ordered the patriarch to open the family's safe, they forced all the family into their vehicles before taking off. By 7:00 a.m., the Gulf Cartel kidnappers reached the second home of the Cázares in neighborhood Río and forced the family to open their front door.〔〔 "We have your brother", one of the kidnappers said as the others guarded the entrance booth of the neighborhood with assault rifles. Four more relatives were kidnapped at the second domicile, owned by Rodolfo's brother Héctor Cázares Garza. However, one of them managed to escape through the back door of the house before running to the third house of the Cázares a few blocks away. A few minutes later, the kidnappers made their way into the third house, owned by Alberto Cázares Garza, one of the other brothers.〔〔 〕 By 8:00 a.m., 18 members of the Cázares family were kidnapped. This mass abduction stood out from other kidnapping cases in Mexico because all of the victims were related.〔〔 〕 Six of the Cázares men, Rodolfo Cázares Garza, Manuel Alberto Cázares Garza, Héctor Cázares Garza, Rodolfo Ignacio Cázares Solís, Rubén Luna Mendoza, and Rodolfo Garza Solís, were kept together.〔 The women and children, along with one of the grandfathers, were kept in a separate vehicle throughout most of the first day. After leaving the house, the captors drove them around the city for several hours and switched them into different vehicles on busy streets in broad daylight.〔 According to one family member, the kidnappers even stopped for gas and did not pay for the service. In their portable radio conversations while driving, the family heard them speaking about avoiding Los Zetas, the rival crime syndicate of the Gulf Cartel. That evening, the women were taken to a hostage safe house where at least twenty other men were drinking and smoking cannabis. The windows in this disclosed location were covered. A shootout broke out near the premises and the victims were transported to another location in another SUV (while in the vehicle, the family was blindfolded and placed next to a corpse). The Cázares had the impression that they kidnappers were looking where to hide their victims. The family believes that the kidnappers moved them around Matamoros for hours because they did not expect to find a lot of people in the houses where they carried out the abductions.〔 Despite the turmoil, the kidnappers tried to keep the victims calm. They told the family that they had inadvertently mistaken their identities and that they were going to be released. "We're from the Gulf Cartel", one of them told them. "We're the good guys" (in the kidnappers's perspective, the "bad guys" were the members of Los Zetas).〔 The women claimed that although they were scared of a few of their captors, for the most part, the kidnappers treated them well. The Cázares recall that the younger members of the kidnapping ring were the friendlier ones and fed the adults milk and bread, and gave the kids juice to drink. Some of them allowed the victims to take of their blindfolds while the boss of the ring was gone. The women and children were kept in a safe house with gunmen for another three days. On July 11, the kidnappers released the women and children around midnight at a Walmart parking lot.〔〔 Five Cázares men, however, remained in captivity (Rodolfo Garza Solís, 82, was later released by his captors sixteen days after the kidnapping).〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「2011 Matamoros mass kidnapping」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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