NUEVO LAREDO, Sept 23: Thousands of jittery Texas residents piled into cars, trucks and buses and fled south of the Rio Grande on Friday, risking refuge in Mexico’s most violent city rather than face Hurricane Rita’s wrath.
Texans and Mexican migrant workers piled across bridges to Nuevo Laredo, from Laredo Texas, throughout the morning, some hauling cherished family valuables in pickup trucks, others escaping with little more than their passports.
“We didn’t expect to get to Mexico. ... We just brought our clothes and some food and left everything else at home,” Maria Leblanc of Houston said as she crossed the border with her son after a 13-hour drive.
Nuevo Laredo is the Mexican city worst hit by a brutal feud between rival drug cartels. More than 1,000 people have been killed nationwide so far this year, more than 130 of them in the border city.
Authorities in Nuevo Laredo said they expected to host up to 10,000 refugees this weekend as hotels across the border in Laredo filled up with Texas residents fleeing from Houston and Gulf coast cities in Rita’s path.
“The highway was packed and we had to drive all night,” said 14-year-old David Hurtado, as he crossed into the city with his father, a Mexican plumber in Houston.
“We just brought the basics: water, food, clothes and some toys,” he added.
Many of the refugees were Americans of Hispanic origin or Mexican immigrant workers heading to cities within Mexico, including Monterrey and Saltillo, some three hours’ drive south of the border, to stay with relatives until Rita blows over.
HASTY EXODUS: Snaking lines formed at a vehicle documentation centre in Nuevo Laredo on Friday as weary refugees lined to register cars and trucks for their onward journey.
“We are heading to Monterrey, where we’ve got family,” Mexican mechanic Eduardo Quezada said as he waited outside the centre with 10 family members. “All we have with us are our most important papers.”
The hasty exodus was repeated at border crossings in Reynosa and Matamoros, south of McAllen and Brownsville, Texas, where local hotels have been booked solid with refugees from Houston and the Gulf coast cities since Wednesday, authorities said.
Refugees said they did not fear violence in Nuevo Laredo, where troops and federal agents have been patrolling the streets since the government took over law enforcement from a corrupt municipal police force in June.
Leblanc said she expected the kind of generosity shown by Houston residents to refugees from New Orleans following last month’s Hurricane Katrina.
“We helped a lot of people in Houston in the Astrodome, and now it’s our turn,” Leblanc said.—Reuters
