The mayor of Río Bravo, Tamaulipas, Miguel Ángel Almaraz Maldonado, recounted on November 8, 2026 that he escaped his captors by jumping a fence and walking 80 kilometers to Coahuila, a state that is keeping him under the protection of its General Prosecutor's Office. The mayor stated that he has no blows or injuries, after being deprived of his liberty for several hours.
The account, reported by Proceso, describes an escape during a lapse in the captors' attention: the mayor and his secretary, Julio César Valderas, jumped the fence, ran for an hour without stopping and wandered all night. The Coahuila government confirmed that it located him at a State Police checkpoint on the border with Zacatecas and that he remains under the protection of the State General Prosecutor's Office. For Mexico, the case illustrates how the response is organized when a municipal president is deprived of his liberty on a highway that crosses three states: the federal Security Cabinet activated an operation with the SSPC, the FGR, the Sedena and the Semar, together with the governments of Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí and Coahuila.
Zacatecas Prosecutor Cristian Camacho Osnaya told El Universal that the mayor's route, from Tamaulipas to Real de Catorce, did not cross Zacatecan territory and that the deprivation of liberty occurred in Cedral, San Luis Potosí. The initial alert came at 16:38 on Saturday over the theft of a businessman's vehicle; at 22:59, San Luis Potosí reported the mayor's disappearance. The cross-checking of information linked the mayor's pickup truck to the vehicle used in that robbery. Intelligence work located the mayor and a companion on a passenger bus, which was intercepted to take him to Saltillo, where he received a medical assessment, food and hydration, according to Vanguardia.
The next step is the mayor's return to Tamaulipas, which the Coahuila and Tamaulipas prosecutor's offices are coordinating from the protection detail. The case offers a signal about interstate search mechanisms and about how events are documented when a victim's route crosses several states without immediate clarity on jurisdiction.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.