Death Road: the terrible nickname of the stage where Debanhi Escobar disappeared

The photograph of Debanhi Escobar standing on the Monterrey - Nuevo Laredo highway became the last image that her family and friends saw of her. Since the early morning of April 8, the 18-year-old girl lost any kind of contact with her loved ones, so state authorities have deployed various search to find their whereabouts.

While investigations by the Nuevo León State Attorney General's Office (FGE) have revealed new clues about Debanhi's case, there are still many loose ends left over tie to learn the truth about what happened to the missing girl.

Although the hope of finding her alive prevails 11 days after her disappearance, the case has brought to the table the evident security deficiency faced by the state of Nuevo León, since the road where Debanhi Escobar was last seen is popularly known as the death road, nickname he earned for the number of missing persons he has accumulated.

Federal Highway 86 Monterrey - Nuevo Laredo covers a 219-kilometer stretch and is one of the main roads in northern Mexico thanks to its effective connection between the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, as well as with the United States border.

For this reason, the road section is mainly used by freight operators, who day after day move goods from Mexico to the United States and vice versa. However, its geographical position has made this road one of the most dangerous roads in the north of the country.

According to the Mexican transport portal, Transporte.Mx, on April 12 three members of a family from Texas were found lifeless inside a water reservoir in the municipality of Anahuac in Nuevo León. The events came after in 2021, the FBI reported her disappearance on the Monterrey - Laredo highway.

In September 2021, the head of the National Commission for the Search of Persons, Karla Quintana, confirmed the discovery of a new killing center in the vicinity of the Monterrey-Nuevo Laredo highway.

“It is a site of important dimensions, where what we found and confirmed was the presence of a clandestine crematorium of important dimensions, where there are also different indications of calcined bone remains,” Quintana explained during her intervention in the program Así las Cosas by journalist Gabriela Warken.

“At first glance it could be said that it is a crematorium that has been used for several years and that it continued to operate until recently in the surrounding areas of Nuevo Laredo,” he added.

According to columnist Héctor de Mauleón, throughout 2021 Tamaulipas authorities have reported 77 disappearances on the 219-kilometer stretch that comprises the Monterrey-Nuevo Laredo highway, of which only 18 people were found alive, and all they said was that armed men forced them to stop in the road and took their vehicles.

Among the missing are 31 trailer drivers, 32 private car drivers, eight private company drivers, three Didi drivers, two Uber drivers and a taxi driver. Most of the victims were men between the ages of 18 and 40, and were from Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, State of Mexico, San Luis Potosi and Veracruz.

One of the victims stated that a group of armed men abducted her on that road, and then took her to a room where other people were tortured and interrogated.

Debanhi Escobar was abandoned exactly at kilometer 15 of the road to Nuevo Laredo. In a radius of a few meters from there is a motel, the company with the registered name Orugatools and the transport company Alcosa, which for a few hours has been under investigation by the Nuevo León prosecutor's office, because security cameras caught the young woman entering the site, however, so far there is no indication of that Debanhi is on the spot, but his parents keep fighting his search.

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