The Tamaulipas Massacre: The American Dream Dies in Mexico
Fifty days of crossing and crying: the remains of the murdered migrants in Tamaulipas arrive in Guatemala
One in three migrants suffers violence as they pass through Mexico, according to a 2019 report from the National Institute of Public Health and the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
This was highlighted once again by the discovery in February of 16 charred corpses of Guatemalan migrants in the border state of Tamaulipas - a massacre in which 12 state policemen confessed to being involved.
The Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States, Alejandro Mayorkas, has reported that this country expects the largest wave of migrants in the last 20 years.
The authorities have responded with more controls, arrests and deportations.
There is a connection between risks, human trafficking, and US immigration policies, says Tonatiuh Guillén López, former commissioner of the National Migration Institute of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador government.
"With the incorporation of the National Guard to contain the migratory flow, people are forced to cross the border through more dangerous places with the presence of organized crime, which leads to events such as the Tamaulipas massacres," explains Guillén, who resigned in 2019 when López Obrador promised to militarize the border with Guatemala in exchange for Washington not imposing tariffs.
The arrival of Joe Biden to the White House will lead to changes in immigration policy.
The new Democratic Administration has canceled the
Remain in Mexico
program
, whereby asylum seekers had to wait for their hearings in border towns such as Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, exposing them to abuse, extortion and kidnapping.
Now thousands of migrants have moved to the border, despite the US and Mexico insisting that the doors remain closed.
How to stop abuses against migrants?
Genoveva Roldán, president of the NGO Sin Fronteras, believes that the first step is to have a historical perspective.
"Mexico maintains contradictory migration policies that violate human rights," he says.
It is an expelling country, he affirms, that has more than 10% of its population in the US We must go to the structural causes in Mexico, the US and all of Latin America, he emphasizes.
Fight ingrained prejudices
"In the long term, we have to talk about changing the economic structure that has Mexico subject to the United States, because even if the president of Mexico changes, the relationship of domination will not do so," says Alfonso Gonzáles Toribio, a Mexican-American professor at the University. from California Riverside and creator of a new research center specializing in Latino issues.
In the coming years, he bets, the dynamics may change, since the US no longer has the same hegemony as 30 years ago.
The Center for Latin American Studies also intends to review the systemic racism that Latinos face in the US The ideology of Trump, whom, Gonzáles Toribio recalls, was voted by 70 million people, came from the research center Center for Immigration Studies (CIS ), founded by historian Otis L. Graham and eugenicist and white supremacist John Tanton.
Right-wing thinker and Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington's idea was that Latinos are "genetically criminal."
That logic structures anti-immigrant policies and has not disappeared.
Hence the need to open a dialogue between the US, Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
Developing the Northern Triangle of Central America
Joe Biden promised in January to deliver $ 4 billion in aid to Central America to curb migration north, according to López Obrador.
In a brief statement, the White House reported that both leaders agreed to address the "root causes" of migratory flows that leave Central America and cross Mexico to reach the United States, as well as promote the development of the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador).
Tonatiuh Guillén López, the former migration commissioner, does not believe that the plan will be of any use if the investment objectives are not modified.
"It is invested in items that do not have to do directly with people's quality of life," he says.
Abandon the logic of detention
Ana Cárdenas, a criminal justice policy researcher and member of the NGO World Justice Project (WJP), affirms that the problem should be addressed without a logic of deprivation of liberty.
He argues that a search could be made without an arrest, leading to more human rights violations leading to humanitarian crises.
"Detention centers are like prisons," says Genoveva Roldán, director of Sin Fronteras, who points out that, in Mexico, they are often saturated and in subhuman conditions.
Migrants "are not criminals," he says: "The vast majority look for opportunities that they cannot find in their country."
For this reason, he even proposes converting the centers into shelters.
A new drug policy
The punitive version of drug use generates more misfortune than solutions, says Tonatiuh Guillén López.
"It generates a large market for drugs and balances of death and violence, and not only corrupts people, but entire governments."
Sociologist Leticia Calderón Chelius agrees that abuses against migrants are related to criminal groups that have agreements with local governments.
Migrants come across these dangerous and violent scenarios.
The right to report
Legally, undocumented migrants in Mexico enjoy the same rights as any Mexican to report a crime, says Ana Cárdenas, from WJP.
In 2008, the immigration law specified that it will not be considered a crime if a person does not have their papers in order;
precisely, so as not to give him a criminal treatment.
Roldán, from Sin Fronteras, points out that it is vital to inform migrants of their rights in their countries of origin.
Train the National Guard
In the National Guard, those who carry out the arrests have military training, says Ana Cárdenas, from WJP.
“They don't know how to treat a detained person.
They are not trained for that, ”he says.
However, the population's confidence indexes in it are very high.
This, according to Genoveva Roldán, from Sin Fronteras, is because people who live in cities bordering the United States, where there is a lot of insecurity, feel protected by these bodies.
And the kind of treatment they give to migrants contributes to many people seeing caravan members as a threat.
Strategy and budget
The amount that is destined to attend migrants represents 0.00004% of the state budget, affirms Genoveva Roldán, from Sin Fronteras.
Tonatiuh Guillén López adds that what goes to NGOs has always been little and, with the López Obrador government, even less.
"We are at the minimum of the minimum," he says.
"There is no strategy."