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.

Mexican officials said they had found 32 Latin American migrants who were kidnapped near the southern US border over the weekend, as record numbers of people make treacherous journeys to try to reach the US.

The migrants from Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Ecuador had been on a coach from Monterrey to Matamoros, which borders Texas, when they were detained on Saturday, public security minister Rosa Icela Rodriguez said on Wednesday. They were forced off the coach by armed masked men and into five vans, she said.

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.

Russia is running a “well-funded disinformation campaign” to spread anti-American sentiment across Latin America, according to U.S. officials, who say Moscow’s activities are occurring at the same time that China ramps up its own influence and military operations in the region.

What many deemed impossible just months ago is reality: Right-wing populist Javier Milei resoundingly won Argentina’s presidency.

The fiery freshman lawmaker’s victory Sunday night has thrust the country into the unknown regarding how extreme his policies will be following a campaign in which he revved a chainsaw to symbolically cut the state down to size.

Javier Milei may have won an unexpectedly large majority in Argentina’s presidential election but the self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” faces huge obstacles to implementing his radical programme to shrink government and dollarise the economy.

Argentina’s dire state, with inflation running at 143 per cent a year, a wildly unrealistic official exchange rate and unsustainable public finances, would pose a daunting challenge for any new head of state.

When there’s no real alternative, there’s no problem, as the saying goes. And that may be the logic of Argentina voters on Sunday who rejected the catastrophe of Peronist rule in favor of impulsive and charismatic outsider Javier Milei, who promised what for Argentina is the radical change of free-market economics.

Jessica Mejía and her family had a good life in Colombia. They owned an electronics business and traveled to Houston every year, where they stayed with Mejía’s older sister Nataly, who had moved to Texas to study English at Houston Community College.

Mejía, her parents and her younger brother would stay for a month, eating out and shopping at Ross or Marshalls before flying back home to Medellín.