In less than five days, Mexico has gone from exonerating the head of the military for links with organized crime to sending those same soldiers to try to stop the caravan of migrants arriving from Honduras.
The National Guard, a military-style body made up 80% of soldiers, was deployed on the banks of the Suchiate River to prevent the arrival of the migrant caravan, which, in turn, was beaten to death in Guatemala to prevent their advance. .
However, some columns bypassed the checkpoints and what was left of the group advances frayed towards Mexico with the aim of reaching the United States border.
EL PAÍS verified the deployment of fifty immigration agents and a similar number of soldiers and national guards on a tour of the Mexican shore of the Suchiate.
The news that reaches the border confirms that most of the caravan is still 400 kilometers from the river but that small groups have managed to circumvent the fence of the Guatemalan authorities and are already concentrating on the border post of Tecún Umán (in Guatemala ).
It all started on Friday when some 3,500 people left San Pedro Sula, the industrial capital of Honduras.
As the hours passed, other groups were added and the contingent increased to 9,000 people, according to authorities' estimates.
From the first moment, Honduras opened the doors by placing a discreet police cordon that served to calm the United States.
It would have been unforgivable to repress those who want to leave a shattered country and even less so if the one who stops the flight is a politically unpopular president like Juan Orlando Hernández.
On Sunday morning, Guatemala did what it could by deploying hundreds of police officers on the road, starting a pitched battle that some managed to avoid.
The declarations of the Director of Migration of Guatemala saying that infiltrated gang members travel in the caravan and referring to organized crime as the driving force behind it, showed the criminalization strategy implemented to try to stop its advance after the tear gas and fear of violence. covid-19 have not worked.
It does not take an economist to intuit the reasons that lead hundreds of people to leave every day due to the dire state with which Honduras begins the year after the passage of hurricanes
I
ota and
Eta,
which destroyed the industrial heart of the Central American country and left to almost a million people in poverty from one day to the next.
The unknown now is the behavior of Mexico and its message to the Joe Biden Administration, which takes office on Wednesday.
After diligently following through with Donald Trump's instructions to stop the caravans in the south, the immigration issue was almost the only one that López Obrador and Biden addressed in the only conversation they have had so far.
In a telephone talk days before Christmas, both leaders agreed to start a new path in migration policy and, at least on paper, promised to promote "cooperation between the United States and Mexico to guarantee safe and orderly migration, contain the coronavirus, boost the economies of North America and secure the common border. "
This will also mean, as reported by the two governments, "dealing with the root causes of migration in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and southern Mexico, to build a future of greater opportunity and security in the region."
Biden admitted in the final stretch of the electoral campaign that during the terms of Barack Obama, when he served as vice president, this emergency was not addressed with the urgency it deserved.
Now he plans to regularize 11 million people who are in the United States without papers in the first days of his administration.
Since in 2018 Mexico welcomed migrants with open arms, handing out residence permits immediately to the militarization of the southern border with the permanent presence of more than 7,000 soldiers of the National Guard, two years have passed, two delegates from Migration and many reports on a supposed
Marshall Plan
that never came.
Consequently, the reports have ushered in soldiers and a radical shift in immigration policy.
Today, the caravans have turned into an obstacle course where the next ditch is a little further south.
This time in Escuintla, four hours from the border with Mexico.
But this time, the size of the caravan is nine times the size of the previous one.
This wave of migration is of special political significance because it occurs at a crucial juncture.
Biden is about to assume the office of president of the United States and has in his hands to turn a turn to the decisions taken by Trump in the last four years.
The outgoing president and López Obrador came to cooperate to contain the caravans and in the face of threats from the magnate, who stirred up the specter of a tariff war on exports, Mexico agreed to militarize the southern border and tighten controls for migrants entering from Guatemala.
Since the migrants decided to unite and the way to try to get to the north stopped being an individual, clandestine and nocturnal adventure to become a collective and vindictive phenomenon exercised in broad daylight and on the main roads, Trump's strategy was the to transfer the migratory problem to Mexico.
Mexico in turn moved it to Guatemala and now the Central American country has placed police filters 100 kilometers further south.
Despite the words of the leaders, the only strategy they have agreed on has been to move the problem lower and lower.