Her husband cut the conversation short. “We got to get out of the state by nightfall or the criminals will get us,” he said. Ester Arce apologized, “No one wants to drive the road.”
As rumors spread that psychotic kidnappers were dragging passengers off buses and as authorities found mass graves piled with scores of bodies, people began calling this corridor “the highway of death” or “the devil’s road.”
On Thursday night, authorities announced the discovery of 32 more corpses. So far, 177 bodies have been found buried around the town of San Fernando.
The highway is so forbidding that even the news these past few weeks of the largest mass grave found in Mexico’s four-year drug war cannot lure TV trucks or journalists onto the road.
The bodies discovered this month are in the same area where cartel kidnappers massacred 72 migrants from Central and South America in August. The terror has only spread since then. On Wednesday, Mexican authorities announced the rescue of 68 individuals found in a stash house in the border city of Reynosa. They had been snatched off buses or grabbed at bus stations.
In San Fernando, the governor of Tamaulipas, Egidio Torre Cantu, arrived for a meeting with city officials Tuesday accompanied by several hundred federal police and soldiers. There was a single Mexican TV crew there. It had arrived escorted by Mexican marines.
Important road
Highway 101 is not a country road. In normal times, it is the most heavily traveled thoroughfare in the state, as vital an artery for commerce and movement in Mexico as Interstate 95 is between Washington and Philadelphia. The highway funnels trade from the interior of Mexico to the busiest border crossings in the world, with 15 bridges from Tamaulipas into the United States along the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo to Matamoros.
But now people who have driven Highway 101 all their lives, who like their Texas neighbors once thought nothing of driving four hours to go out to dinner with friends, refuse to get on the road.
“I waited almost two days in Brownsville, reading the newspapers, watching the news, trying to get up the courage to cross the border and come down,” said Robert Avila, who lives in Dallas but often comes to the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, to visit his parents and siblings.
“I thought about going home and getting my gun,” Avila said, but didn’t.
From the bus depot in Ciudad Victoria to the state morgue in the border city of Matamoros, where the 145 corpses were first taken, is 200 miles. The U.S. government has warned its citizens not to drive the road.
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