MASS GRAVES RAISE CONCERNS ABOUT BRAZEN GANGS KIDNAPPING MEXICAN MIGRANTS

MEXICO CITY -- They were young men, traveling by bus to work in the
fields and factories of northeastern Mexico, or perhaps hoping to get
across the border to a job in the United States. Somewhere along the
way, they vanished.

The discovery this week of 72 bodies dumped in mass graves in a
no-man's-land about 85 miles south of the United States border may
offer a terrible answer to the mystery of what happened to at least
some of the missing men. They were forced off the buses at gunpoint,
perhaps kidnapped for ransom or press-ganged into drug cartels, officials say.

Much of this is still speculation, awaiting the identification of
many of the bodies that are lying in a refrigerated truck outside the
morgue in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Tex.

But what it suggests is that criminal gangs operating south of the
Texas border in Tamaulipas State have become so bold that they now
target innocent victims in full view of witnesses.

That the kidnappings occurred in an area that should have been the
focus of law enforcement efforts makes them even more brazen. Last
August, the bodies of 72 South and Central American migrants were
found very close to where the latest graves were discovered, in the
municipality of San Fernando. Since then, President Felipe Calderon,
who has not spoken publicly about the latest killings, has poured
troops into Tamaulipas.

Migrants crossing through Mexico have long been vulnerable to
kidnapping because they are fearful of going to the authorities. But
now, the bus kidnappings suggest that the gangs operating in
Tamaulipas, which has become a battleground between the Zetas and
their former bosses in the Gulf Cartel, have begun to target Mexicans.

Since Thursday, when news of the graves broke, families whose
relatives have disappeared have been filing into the offices of the
Tamaulipas State prosecutor in Matamoros, filling out papers in the
hope that sometime next week, when authorities say they will have
identified the bodies, there will be news of some kind, even if it is bad.

Many of the families last saw their relatives long before the reports
of the bus kidnappings broke, but they seemed eager to explore even
the remotest of possibilities.

Elio Morales Garcia's 18-year-old son went out to play football last
June and never came home to his family in Matamoros. "I have heard
nothing of him since then," said Mr. Morales, a construction worker
who came with his wife and daughter on Friday afternoon.

At first he was told that his son, who is also called Elio and sold
fruit juices on the street, had been arrested by the Mexican Navy,
but the navy gave him no information. "We thought maybe he was being
held in Mexico City for some kind of problem," he said.

Seizing on any scrap of news, Mr. Morales came to the prosecutor's
office on Friday, hoping that perhaps he could speak to one of the
freed hostages, that somebody had seen his son.

"We just came to check," he said. "We still have hope. We will be
back Tuesday to check."

Daniel Alvarez Vazquez came in search of news of his son, Emilio
Alvarez Perez, 30, who worked the night shift at a hotel in San
Fernando. "The bad people" took him away in a truck one night in
March 2010, said Mr. Alvarez, 77.

Calls have also been coming in from across a central belt of states
where people have disappeared after they set off on buses to the
border along a route took them across Tamaulipas.

The authorities in Michoacan reported that three groups from that
state had disappeared in the past weeks as they crossed through
Tamaulipas. A group of 40 people from the central state of Queretaro
disappeared in March 2010 without a trace. Twenty agricultural
workers from San Luis Potosi, the state on the border of Tamaulipas,
have also been missing since last year.

Morelos Canseco Gomez, the interior secretary of Tamaulipas state,
said in media interviews on Friday that all the victims appeared to
be men and that he believed they were all Mexican. Ten graves have
been found so far, but he said it was possible that more could be
discovered as security forces continue to search.

The bus kidnappings emerged two weeks ago after family members
reported missing relatives. State and federal authorities arrested 14
people and freed five hostages who had been kidnapped from one of the
buses. That led the authorities to the mass graves, which they began
to uncover on April 1.

A picture of some of the missing men began to emerge Friday.

In Guanajuato, 21 people who were traveling to the border through
Tamaulipas have been reported missing over the past couple of days,
said the attorney general there. Citing relatives and witnesses, the
attorney general, Carlos Zamarripa, gave a chilling account of what
happened to one group that had set off from the city of Celaya in two
buses bound for the border.

As the buses neared San Fernando, armed men boarded and asked
everybody to show their identification, Mr. Zamarripa said. They
selected 17 people, forced them off and ordered the buses to drive on.

The witnesses assumed that it was a criminal group "by the way they
operated and how they behaved, how they spoke," he said.