Mexico’s president clarifies that 32 abducted migrants were freed, not rescued

Migrants from several countries abducted from a bus and held by armed men for days near Mexico’s border with Texas were released by their captors, not rescued as initially reported by authorities, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday.

“They decided to let them go,” López Obrador said during his morning press briefing. The 32 migrants — authorities corrected the initial number of 31 after discovering there was a baby among the group that had not been included because it hadn’t purchased a bus ticket — were from Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras and Mexico.

The president said that the migrants had been left in the parking lot of a shopping center in Rio Bravo, Tamaulipas, and that no arrests had been made.