MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s National Guard shot dead two Colombians and wounded four others in what the Defense Department called a confrontation near the U.S. border.

Colombia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that all the victims were migrants “caught in the crossfire.” He identified the dead as a 20-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman, and gave the number of wounded Colombians as five, not four. There was no immediate explanation for this discrepancy.

Mexico’s Defense Ministry, which controls the National Guard, did not respond Monday to requests for comment on whether the victims were migrants, but it said a Colombian who was not injured in the shooting had been handed over to immigration officials, suggesting they were.

If these were migrants, it would be the second time in just over a month that Mexican military forces opened fire on and killed migrants.

On October 1, the day President Claudia Sheinbaum took office, soldiers opened fire on a truck, killing six migrants in the southern state of Chiapas. An 11-year-old Egyptian girl, her 18-year-old sister and a 17-year-old boy from El Salvador died in the shooting, as well as people from Peru and Honduras.

The most recent shootings took place Saturday on a dirt road near Tecate, east of Otay Mesa on the California border, frequently used by Mexican migrant smugglers, the department said in a statement Sunday evening .

The Defense Department said a militarized National Guard patrol came under fire after spotting two trucks in the area, which is near an informal border crossing and a wind power plant known as from La Rumorosa.

A truck sped off and fled. The National Guard opened fire on the other truck, killing two Colombians and injuring four others. No information was immediately available on their condition and no casualties were reported among the guards involved.

A Colombian man and a Mexican man were found and detained unharmed at the scene, and the departments said officers found a pistol and several magazines commonly used for assault rifles at the scene.

Colombians have sometimes been recruited as gunmen by Mexican drug cartels, which are also heavily involved in migrant smuggling. But the fact that the survivor was handed over to immigration officials and that the Ministry of Foreign Relations contacted the Colombian consulate suggests that they were migrants.

Cartel gunmen sometimes escort or kidnap migrants as they head toward the U.S. border. One possible scenario was that armed migrant smugglers were in one or both trucks, but the migrants were mostly unarmed passers-by.

The Defense Ministry said the three National Guard officers who opened fire had been removed from duty.

Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office on September 30, gave the military an unprecedented role in public life and law enforcement; he created the militarized Guard and used the combined military forces as the country’s primary law enforcement, supplanting the police. The Guard has since been placed under the control of the army.

But critics say the military is not trained to handle civilian law enforcement work. Moreover, the uneven death toll in such clashes – in which all the deaths and injuries occur on one side – raises suspicions among activists that a clash is real.

For example, soldiers who opened fire in Chiapas – and who were detained pending charges – claimed to have heard “bangs” before opening fire. There is no indication that any weapons were found at the scene.

_