The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

"We are defeated": climate migrants seek the American dream but are returned to Mexico

2021-03-25T22:07:22.990Z


Dozens of people are returned to Ciudad Juárez every day after a frustrated flight from the most severe consequences of climate change. "I'm afraid that this could happen to me, but when you need it, you go out, whatever happens, because there is no option," explains one of them.


CIUDAD JUÁREZ - Deivis Nahum Espina's tragedy fell from the sky.

A long deluge hit their village in Honduras, flooding the crops, blurring the grounds, destroying houses and roads.

“It was like in the Bible,” he recounted as he pointed to the sky and described the devastation caused by cyclones Eta and Iota in 2020.

That cataclysm prompted him to leave his country, at the age of 31 and accompanied by his two children, his sister and his nephews.

"We came walking and, at times, in buses, it was like two months of travel," he explained.

On March 15, he finally crossed the border through the Mexican town of Reynosa and surrendered to the US authorities. 

"They put us on immigration, they did the tests and we endured cold for two nights, but they did not tell us we were coming here," he counted with discouragement two days later at the facilities of the State Council for Population and Attention to Migrants (Coespo) of the state of Chihuahua, in Ciudad Juárez.

Every so often he asked again where he was, as if he believed it had all been a mistake.

Mexico increases deportations of Central American migrants who cross into its territory

March 24, 202100: 23

["My wife is dead, my grandchildren are dead."

This Eta survivor says he lost 40 family members]

Espina was returned to Mexico without the possibility of requesting asylum at the United States border due to the application of Title 42, a rule promoted by then-President Donald Trump to prevent the entry of foreigners, alleging the threat they would pose to public health due to the pandemic of coronavirus.

Between March 21, 2020, when it was invoked, and last January, border authorities reported more than 62,000 express expulsions of asylum seekers under this measure. 

"We have many people who were returnees and are in a very inconvenient situation because they do not want to request an international protection measure such as refuge in Mexico, and they do not want to return to their countries but wait to see if they can cross," explained Enrique Valenzuela, Coespo coordinator.

From his office, Valenzuela can see, in real time, the transit of people across the Paso del Norte International Bridge.

On many occasions, you leave your meetings in a hurry as you observe the long lines of tearful and anguished people moving slowly down the pedestrian crossing.

After the arrival of Joe Biden to the White House, the authorities of the Mexican state of Chihuahua began to notice the increase in the flow of migrants returned through the border access points.

Now they are arriving, on average, between 80 and 100 people a day.

“They are in a kind of migratory limbo.

That is to say: they are not in their land, here they cannot and do not want to regularize themselves, and they cannot go anywhere they want to request international protection.

For them it is a bureaucratic labyrinth that generates a lot of anguish ”, he explains with concern.

 [The immigration authorities propose urgent measures to face the growing arrival of minors]

"If I didn't give more money, they could hurt me," says a migrant mother who escaped from the coyotes.

March 23, 202102: 08

Fleeing the storms and hunger

In the year of the coronavirus pandemic, with more than two million deaths worldwide, Central America also suffered the consequences of the climate emergency with the formation of 30 cyclones that devastated entire regions and fueled the need to emigrate. 

In the Dry Corridor of Central America, a 1,000-mile-long geographic zone that runs through the Mexican state of Chiapas and stretches across Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, there are

eight million people who suffer from food insecurity due to the harsh effects climate change

, according to a report by the organizations Action Against Hunger, COOPI, Trócaire, Oxfam and We World-GVClos.

"Some migrants from the region are beginning to identify the impacts of hurricanes as reasons for migration. There is a good chance that migration, first internal and perhaps international, will also increase," explained Pablo Escribano, a specialist at the International Organization for Migration.

Undocumented migrants seek alternate routes after the closure of some roads by Mexican authorities

March 23, 202102: 17

[ICE explains what its targets will be from now on for arrests and deportations]

In Honduras, the devastating passage in just two weeks of Tropical Storm Eta (which made landfall in the north of the country on November 5, 2020) and Hurricane Iota (November 18) left

more than 250,000 people with hardly any chance of access services of any kind

, including health.

In November 2020, Francisco Ardeñal, director of the National Center for Atmospheric, Oceanographic and Seismic Studies, began to realize that Honduras was experiencing an unprecedented climatic situation.

“It was extraordinary because we have never had two cyclones so closely together since the meteorological records began in 1951," he explains, "there is a combination of the current environmental deterioration and the degree of vulnerability of people who have built near rivers and in areas risky".

Ardeñal says that only Eta caused more than 800 millimeters of rain to fall during seven days in the north of the country in November, when the normal amount is 400 or 450. That is,

all the rainfall for two months was concentrated in one week

, which it overflowed rivers and caused flooding that Iota only made worse.

“Something that links these phenomena with global warming is that, in less than 36 hours, they rapidly evolved from a tropical depression to becoming category 4 hurricanes. This had not been seen before and is linked to the rise in the surface temperature of the sea ​​and higher amounts of latent steam that are related to climate change and the emergence of more cyclones in the region ”, asserts the expert.

"The impact has been tremendous," explained Marco Antonio Suazo, a consultant for the Project HOPE organization.

"There are still homes destroyed, sectors full of mud as the flood left them. In addition, many people lost their jobs due to the pandemic," he added.

"Now we see almost entire families where fathers, mothers and children mobilize to pursue a dream but do not know the risks, their health conditions or the language. We are very poor countries where the horizon of most of the people is the United States. ", asserts Suazo.

One of those people is Estefany Suazo, from the Honduran town of El Calán, who spoke with a team from Noticias Telemundo last week: "There is a new caravan and I have thought about leaving with the two girls, because the truth here I cannot do nothing".

"Let us open the door to the US": the message of a migrant child to Biden while he waits in Mexico

March 22, 202101: 46

A report published in February by the Franciscan Network for Migrants estimates that 34 people emigrate every hour from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

They are countries plagued by violence, poverty and political instability, but "the new faces" of this exodus this year are "climate migrants", who leave Honduras above all after being "homeless, jobless and without crops" , as explained by Rubén Figueroa, a member of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, a non-governmental organization that monitors the displacement of people in southern Mexico.

Figueroa predicts that the exodus will increase and will eventually reach pre-pandemic levels: "This worries us because migrants are very vulnerable to human trafficking networks and are exposed to many dangers." 

The humanitarian crisis worsens due to the incessant arrival of migrants to the United States border with Mexico

March 21, 202102: 02

 [The arrival of migrants reaches record numbers and the coyotes take advantage of the confusion with harmful lies]

This is the case of Dagoberto Pineda: for years he worked on a banana plantation in Chiquita, but was fired after the passage of the Eta storm, which destroyed his village in Honduras.

Without a job or the possibility of rebuilding his home, he watched as many of his companions left with the

coyotes

for the United States.

and decided that it was also his time to leave.

"We fled because we lost everything. There we have nothing left, so I decided to take a risk. But I did not achieve anything," he explained on March 17.

He spent five days in US immigration facilities before being returned to Ciudad Juárez.

"They told us they were going to help us but they didn't give us anything. They took away our things, clothes and everything because they said it was garbage," he lamented at the Coespo headquarters.

"We warn the Administration of this possible situation": activists assure that the Government was not prepared for the arrival of migrants to the border

March 21, 202101: 52

 [ICE changes course: it will stop deportations and focus on newcomers and criminals]

A few feet away Alba Juárez Méndez burst into tears.

He said that he liked his life without luxuries, but with the security of having a roof over his head and being able to feed his children with the planting of potatoes, corn and beans from his milpa in the village of Sóchel, in the Guatemalan province of San Marcos.

But the storms left his house of wood and sheets like a sieve.

Laughing and crying, she explains that sometimes it rained more inside than outside.

"The holes were so big that many times we would get out because everything got wet inside. We never had electricity, but after the hurricane there was no water either, we were left without work and the planting was over. Then we couldn't stay," she said between sobs .

Her hope was to cross to the United States and be reunited with her uncle, who lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, because the 300 quetzals ($ 39) she earned each month cleaning houses and washing clothes were not enough to guarantee food for Yareli, her two-year-old daughter. years, amidst the devastation left by the storms.

That is why he left Guatemala a month and a half ago, walking and hitchhiking until he reached Ciudad Juárez.

Honduran immigrant who comes to meet her son begs not to be deported

March 20, 202102: 01

[What does the suspension of the asylum agreements between the US and Central American countries mean]

"But, as I did not come with a

coyote

, I did not know anything. I arrived at the bridge and the

Mexican

immigration

did not let me pass. They said that the border is closed due to the pandemic and they did not even give me a shelter," he explained between sobs.

Juárez Méndez says she desperately left the Mexican facility on the night of March 17, when she was told there was no space for her to stay in any of the 18 shelters in Ciudad Juárez.

He walked for an hour, penniless, through the dusty streets of the border until a woman was moved and offered to give him accommodation in exchange for work.

A group of migrants outside the State Population Council in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, on March 18, Albinson Linares

"And so we are in Mexico, we cannot return, there we are defeated," he explains, "I hope the president lets us pass, we don't want to steal anything but have a future, build a house, have electricity, water and studies for my daughter." .

His voice breaks when he remembers 16 compatriots who were shot and burned in Tamaulipas on January 22.

They were migrants who, like her, were looking for an opportunity fleeing the violence and economic crisis that the pandemic exacerbated in Central America.

"I'm afraid that that could happen to me but, when one has a need, they go out, whatever happens, because there is no option," he concludes with a sigh, "they fought for their lives and looked for a way, but look what happened to them. ".

Raúl Torres, correspondent for Noticias Telemundo, contributed to this report.

If you have complaints about the climate emergency in Mexico and Central America, you can write to albinson.linares@nbcuni.com

Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2021-03-25

You may like

News/Politics 2024-03-26T05:15:03.219Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.