In the pale morning light, a line of cars begins to form at the police station. With no troopers in sight, nervous drivers discuss options.

“They’d told me there’d be a convoy but now they’re saying there won’t,” Ariff Galindo tells new arrivals. The 29-year-old is travelling north with his wife and their one-year-old daughter to the border town Reynosa. “Let’s wait for a couple more cars then we’ll go together.”

For years now, the only safe way to drive the three hours from Ciudad Victoria to the US border has been in a police-guarded convoy. Drawing more than one hundred drivers per day at its peak, it’s now being phased out. Authorities say demand is low because the highway has become safer.

The makeshift citizen convoy picks up speed as soon as it clears the city, easily hitting 85mph.

Fifteen minutes up the road lurks a dark memory for Galindo. Driving back from the border in 2009, he slowed for a checkpoint. But it wasn’t the police or army pulling him over, it was a drug cartel. They wanted his car. Surrounded with automatic rifles, he got out, left everything and walked to the nearest town with dozens of other shell-shocked drivers.

It’s just after 7am and most of Ciudad Victoria is waking up to grim news that belies official claims of improved security: Alan Pulido, a beloved local football star who plays for Greece’s Olympiakos and the Mexican national team, has disappeared, nabbed from his BMW by armed men on a rural road outside the city.