It was a rare sight in the Borderland, as a U.S military helicopter hovered over the Benito Juarez Olympic Stadium in Juárez as an emergency basket slowly was brought up to the open door.
The presence of a U.S. military vehicle over the industrial city just on the other side of the Río Grande generated a stir among residents.
“We saw the helicopter from the United States,” Manuel Ángel Cruz, a resident of Juárez, told the El Paso Times as he looked on at the exercises. “We asked, what are they doing here? What are they looking for?”
Another young observer, Ángel Cruz Ríos, added, “It was like in the XBox video games.”
The helicopters were part of a bi-national exercise with the Mexican military for the 2024 “Fuerzas Amigas,” or the “Friendly Forces” in Spanish, a disaster relief exercise that ran from June 24 to 29 in the border city.
The yearly exercise is a collaboration between the United State’s Defense Support of Civil Authorities and Mexico’s National Defense Plan-III to prepare for natural disaster response and relief. It brought together 220 U.S. soldiers from the Joint Task Force Civil Support of the U.S. Army’s Northern Command based in Fort Eustis, Virginia, with 280 Mexican soldiers.
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Source: El Paso Times
