Tired of waiting and surviving, between 500 and 700 migrants decided to leave Tapachula (Chiapas) together and move north in search of a better place to await the response to their refugee requests.
They left in a group on Saturday, and although the National Guard tried to stop them, they continued walking, but already scattered.
Paradoxes of life, at the same time in the morning that the contingent was moving north on Saturday, the vehicle of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador who was on tour in Chiapas passed by.
The new caravan, now destroyed by blows and captures among those who could least run, is made up mainly of Haitians, many who previously arrived in Chile, where they resided after the 2010 earthquake that left more than 250,000 dead. Others left the country in this last and troubled month in the Caribbean country, in which their president was assassinated and a force 7 earthquake destroyed the Les Cayes region. To this is added that for two weeks almost daily flights arrive to Chiapas and Tabasco from Texas with hundreds of deported Central Americans.
The decision to leave the border city was the reaction to the administrative silence of the Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (Comar), the body in charge of responding to refugee requests.
Much of the problem is that the Commission is overwhelmed and takes more than a year to resolve the requests even though it is obliged to do so in less than three months.
Migrant families travel through Tapachula, Chiapas.Pedro Anza / CUARTOSCURO
As they explain, many migrants want to complete the process and do not intend to reach the United States but need to leave Chiapas in search of some other city in which to find work and leave the destitute conditions in which they survive in Chiapas. “The important thing is not to cross the border, but to leave Tapachula to find some other way to work elsewhere. In Chiapas there is no work. In Chiapas there is no way to live, people are treating us like animals. If we are refugees, what we are looking for is a way of living to be able to eat ”, explained a young Haitian before starting the caravan.
The needs and demands are not new. Last week the migrants held protests at the doors of the National Migration Institute (INM) and the Comar, to ask for the speeding up of their procedures. According to Mexican government law, as long as Comar does not rule on each request, migrants cannot leave the city where they started the process, in this case, the city of Tapachula. Precisely Comar has been one of the organizations that has reduced its budget the most and its staff has been reduced notably despite facing a humanitarian crisis that increases in number every day and has put the border city to the limit by seeing it as a provincial city with just infrastructures and few decent jobs to offer, it was filled with thousands of migrants without a peso in the bag or more occupation to wait.Currently appointments for Comar are being granted for January and Human Rights associations have denounced irregular deportations of Central Americans and Caribbean people with the papers in process.
A Human Rights group (COMDHSM) that has followed the departure of the caravan denounced that yesterday's containment operation there was an "excessive and unjustified deployment of security forces" of a contingent made up of 50 military vehicles, from the National Guard and the Migration Institute.
“People were attacked, subjected, beaten with shields and batons;
the carrying of long weapons was identified by elements of the army, elements of the INM dressed in civilian clothes inciting aggression, as well as other unidentified security agents, civilian clothes and carrying firearms ”.
Confrontation between elements of the National Guard and migrant families.
Pedro Anza / CUARTOSCURO
The 'shield' deployed by Mexico to prevent the departure of migrants has 14,000 elements of the Army, Navy and National Guard deployed along the 650-kilometer border between Chiapas and Guatemala.
According to General Luis Cresencio Sandoval, Secretary of National Defense, he recognized the operational activities of the military in the south of the country have as a "main objective" to stop migration, "he said on Friday. “All these activities have different objectives, the main one being to stop all migration (…) in order to rescue the migrants,” he said in Chiapas, coinciding with López Obrador's visit to the region. A day before, López Obrador had promised to "help" Washington in migration after the ruling of the United States Supreme Court to reimpose the Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP, in English), known as "Stay in Mexico."
The region is experiencing a record wave of migration, with more than 212,000 undocumented persons detained in July at the United States border, while Migración de México (INM) officially registered 382,000 “irregular entries” in the last two years, a figure far removed from the reality.
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