Activist: Kidnapping, killings of call center workers in Mexico has been happening for years

By MARK STEVENSON
Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A missing-persons activist says call center workers have been going missing in Mexico since at least 2017. Activist Hector Flores says authorities’ failure to investigate those disappearances helped set the stage for what authorities suspect was the mass kidnap-killing of eight young call center employees last month. The violent Jalisco cartel operates call centers that target Americans in timeshare frauds. The cartel is suspected of killing people who try to quit working at these call centers. A U.S. official confirmed that authorities suspect that the eight workers kidnapped in mid-May _ and whose bodies were identified Tuesday _ were targeted when they tried to leave jobs at a cartel-run call center, and that they may not have been the first ones.