What used to be the central park of Tapachula, this afternoon is a labyrinth. A network of alleys delimited by metal fencing through which hundreds of migrants wander with no other destination than to deceive hunger for a few hours, tire their body enough to reach the room without ventilation or water where they will sleep with another dozen bodies waste. There is no job or other form of resistance than the money sent in cash by a family member to the remittance banks with hundreds of people lining up at their doors. The sidewalks of this city, the largest on the entire border that divides Mexico from Guatemala, its concrete benches and boiling asphalt, are the bars of an open-air jail. A poor corner of miserable Mexico where tens of thousands of migrants arrive as best they can and are deported on a bus.
Tapachula has become the largest funnel of migrants in America.
The wall that Donald Trump dreamed of concentrated in a single municipality of 300,000 inhabitants.
While this Thursday in Washington the envoys of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Joe Biden boasted their good relations and agreed economic aid to stop migration from Central America - with the Sowing Life and Building the Future programs - in this city more have been accumulated. 35,000 people since January seeking refuge or humanitarian visa.
To these must be added the thousands who did so during the last year during the worst moment of the pandemic and who have not yet received a response.
Migrants from Haiti rest in a rented room in the center of Tapachula.
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On video, the crisis in Tapachula.
(Nayeli Cruz)
Never in history has Mexico received so many people fleeing their countries.
If in 2019 they were at least 70,400, this year they expect more than 120,000, according to official figures.
And the vast majority do so through Tapachula, where 70% of asylum applications are registered, the only possible tool to receive a role to teach immigration agents, earn a living and not be deported.
Although his goal is always north: to reach the United States.
This is the macabre labyrinth of Tapachula, which always begins and ends in these barbed-wire streets.
To arrive, to survive, not to be able to take it anymore, to flee to the mountains, to the jungle, to be detained, returned to the other side of the border.
And then start over.
Try again.
Migrants from Haiti and Central America sell food in the center of Tapachula.Nayeli Cruz
The arrival
Wendy does not know if he has arrived or if he is still fleeing.
A month ago he left his home in San Pedro Sula with what he was wearing.
Some
jeans
, a fuchsia sweater, fear and anger painted on her face and her 12-year-old daughter clinging to her arm.
Some passports and a medical certificate attesting that, that same afternoon in which she decided to leave her land, a gang member raped her in her living room.
The coldness of the bureaucracy makes that paper his only safe-conduct against returning to hell.
Although he cannot verify it, his eyes are filled with terror when he tells that what really made them flee was being aware that if they stayed, his daughter would suffer the same fate.
That night they took to the streets.
They stopped a fruit truck and hid between boxes of food.
The truck driver left them at the gates of Mexico 13 hours later: in Tecún Umán, the last Central American pass (in Guatemala), half an hour by car from Tapachula.
From there his new life began.
About 200 pesos (10 dollars) to a rafter to cross the Suchiate River.
It is still not explained how no one stopped them on the shore.
Despite the fact that a few meters away the Migration officers observe the river and there the major operatives are deployed for the photo when López Obrador wants to send the message to his neighbor to the north that he is doing his job.
He did not know that the real wall was a few kilometers ahead.
This afternoon Wendy - who prefers not to give her last name for safety - is at the doors of the Salinas and Rocha department stores to collect some money that her family sends her. They have only eaten fried banana for more than two weeks. There are 80 other people on the street. The local employees have distributed pieces of paper with a number. They explain that a day only 200 people can access and the quota has already been exceeded. Wendy got number 63 for the next day. This is the second time you have tried it this week.
The first thing a migrant does when arriving in Tapachula is to try to get a document that prevents them from being returned to the point of departure.
They go to the offices of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid (Comar) and make an appointment.
But the institution is saturated, the budget reduction and the lack of personnel and means to attend the huge arrival of migrants in recent months has caused the first plug: there are no dates until December.
There is no other option but to hold out for a few months.
Wendy has found a job for the Movistar offices, sells telephone chips in exchange for a commission.
Her potential clients, desperate migrants wandering between wires and penniless like her.
If he does well, he will earn 80 pesos in one day, about $ 4.
This week he has not won anything.
Haitians and Central Americans line up to withdraw the remittances sent by their relatives.
Nayeli Cruz
The Mousetrap
Near the line where Wendy and nearly a hundred others wait for a few dollars to save them from misery, a group of Haitians have blocked a street with banners.
"There is no job in Tapachula for Haitians," reads a poster.
“Where are the human rights workers?
We told the UN to speak with the authorities in Chiapas so that they do not mistreat us more, ”says another.
As they are being held, they shout slogans in Creole.
Nobody understands them in this city.
A taxi driver in a hurry decides to push one of the protesters with the nose of the car.
Immediately the whole group goes against the car.
It was the missing wick.
Many have a strong desire to hit the vehicle.
"Did you see what they do to us?"
They don't want us here.
In this city where the racist outbreaks of others in the north, such as Tijuana, did not explode with the Central American migrant crisis, he is at the limit of tolerance with Haitian immigrants. The discussion does not revolve around “they take away our work”, because there are hardly any. And if they are lucky they will help for a few pesos to do what the rest discards: pick up the rotten fruit from the market, carry some boxes, sweep doors, some botched by a neighbor. But they feel persecuted: "If we hit that car, it is the downfall," says Juan, 36, originally from Hincha, two and a half hours from Port-au-Prince.
Juan is not really called Juan.
But that's how everyone in the city knows him and that's how he wants to be mentioned in the report.
His phone, connected to the internet whenever possible, is, like most of them, the only tool that connects him to what he was before: when he was an agronomist, he had a place to live in Chile, a job, a mattress to sleep on.
And also, a powerful mobilization weapon these days.
The WhatsApp groups on your phone are abuzz with Haitians desperate to get out of there.
Fearful of doing so without a document registering their asylum claim for humanitarian reasons.
There they have received dozens of videos of Migration officials hunting down their countrymen on the road, beating them like animals on the asphalt, locking them in shut-down vans without ventilation or air conditioning.
—If I want to send a few messages, I mobilize more than 1,000 Haitians.
This is how the four caravans of the last weeks were created in Tapachula.
Juan did not attend any of them, as he is convinced that if they are not more than 2,000 or 3,000 people, they will end up being locked up in Tapachula again.
Or worse, many of those who have returned from the escape attempts have ended up in Guatemala.
"Can you explain to me how it is possible that they send us to Guatemala if we are not from there, if we are asking for refuge in Mexico?" Says another Haitian, Fladimy Delice, 31, who has been returned twice with his wife and his one and a half year old baby.
One of them was this morning.
The National Migration Institute has refused to answer questions from this newspaper on this matter. And in Tapachula, thousands of asylum seekers who can legally circulate throughout the State of Chiapas are living together these days, who are being detained when they try to leave for another municipality and others who, according to a dozen migrants interviewed by this newspaper, have been deported to Central America on a bus.
Tapachula is also a mousetrap that slowly suffocates them.
For those who have not dared to escape or those who have forcibly returned to its streets, the city has become an uninhabitable place.
The hotels are making cash with prices that triple those of the capital.
There are almost no rooms available for rent and the ones that exist are offered at exorbitant prices: Wendy and her daughter live with 10 Haitians in a small room without electricity, bathroom or mattresses, for which they pay 3,000 pesos a month ($ 150).
The migrants huddle in zulos, stair landings, building entrances, any space with a roof that ensures that the
migra
will not fall on them
at dawn.
A boy from Haiti sleeps on the ground in Tapachula.
Nayeli Cruz
That same afternoon Juan shows the place where he lives with 60 other people.
The space is a garage and they pay 7,000 pesos ($ 350) for it.
They have a bathroom where they only get water twice a week.
On the street, the thermometer touches 31 degrees.
In there, the thermal sensation is much more.
Inside this garage attached to the owner's chalet, they group together to sleep on some blankets and cook during the day.
A makeshift stove connected to a gas bottle, which does not last seven days, another 2,000 pesos ($ 100).
This Wednesday two women were frying a soup with potatoes and some bananas.
There are about six children under the age of five there.
"The truth is that I never thought I'd end up living like this."
At night, the streets of downtown Tapachula belong to the Haitians.
Calle 12, behind the central park, is an anthill of people who sell whatever: soup, socks, sneakers, braids, gum, more bananas, improvised barber shops in the middle of the sidewalk.
The smoke from the pots mixes in the environment with that of a dozen cars and vans stuck that cannot circulate.
And among the vehicles, more and more people have turned a main street into a survival market.
Juan looks at the apartment concerned when he is asked how it is possible that, given the living conditions, the tranquility and little social conflict prevail in the city.
"Do you know what is said in my land when you can't take it anymore?"
Tout bèt jennen mòde
: all enclosed animals, when disturbed, bite.
The escape
Commander Lempira can no longer look back.
It was one of the visible faces - although covered with a red bandana - of the caravans of the last days.
He mobilized hundreds of Haitians and Central Americans desperate to flee Tapachula through WhatsApp groups and public calls in the central park.
He doesn't even trust his shadow.
He has received death threats and few know these days where he is hiding.
It goes without saying that he is a military man.
His robust body despite beatings, races, hunger and the jungle, remains almost intact more than 100 kilometers from the southern capital.
His feet, however, look like those of a pilgrim: cuts, bruises, blisters and a trauma to the left that has inflated his instep to the same width as his ankle.
You can't help but feel fear and disappointment after the first few caravans have been pulverized. Now he is walking north with three more women, but four people are few to defend himself from the dangers that threaten a migrant at this point along the way. The night crossings through the jungle to avoid the roads and thus to the
migra
; the eternal walks along the train tracks, where assailants always appear ready to sew them with machetes for a cell phone and the little money they bring; the hawks of a cartel waiting to sell them to them and recruit him, kidnap them, further suffocate their families; die at that point without anyone knowing, or ever asking what happened.
He proudly recalls the times they managed to dodge the military checkpoints and how when they were going to catch up with them in Huixtla (40 kilometers north of Tapachula) they designed a migrant counteroffensive that gave them a day's head start.
"We hid in the bush."
I organized a group of about twenty boys to surprise the agents before they ran into us.
We had to defend ourselves, there was no other way.
We reached them with stones before they got out of the trucks and even though there were more than 100 of them, they ran away.
The confrontation on Sunday 5 took place after a week in which Migration chased them as if they were cattle on the road and beating whoever they found in their path, everything was recorded in images that caused an international scandal.
López Obrador denounced the violence, two agents were punished, but justified the "containment" of the migratory wave on the southern border.
The progressive president who carries as his banner the defense of those who have nothing has been portrayed this week as the most implacable leader against migration.
A Central American migrant shows her injured foot after several days on her way north, in the municipality of Escuintla, Chiapas.
Nayeli Cruz
That night at dawn, the National Guard - the president's flagship body - and hundreds of immigration agents surrounded the place where they slept, in a pavilion in Huixtla, and captured most of them. Some fled to the mountain, others to the river. The remains of the caravan are still scattered, like Lempira's group.
This Wednesday the commander asked to speak with the parish priest of one of those towns that only migrants know. Huehuetán, Huixtla, Escuintla, Mapstepec, Tonalá, Arriaga… These are municipalities that a Honduran, Salvadoran or Guatemalan would know how to place on the map much faster than any Mexican. Rural and poor towns in the most marginal Mexico, where the Government only goes in the event of a hurricane or earthquake and its inhabitants have only seen the president or a governor through the television in the store, always tuned to the channel of the Stars, Televisa .
Lempira's group has managed to spend the night on a roof outside the church.
And in the early morning, before the sun rises, he has resumed his way north.
To avoid the checkpoints they have walked all day through a swampy jungle, with mud up to their knees and, exhausted, they have sent an image of their refuge in the undergrowth.
WhatsApp voice message on Friday, September 10 at 9.16 am.
Two weeks after his departure from Tapachula.
—We came a little scratched, a little beaten,
migration
ran
us
, thank God he couldn't reach us, this one… They wanted to assault us with a machete, a tarantula bit us, we got two snakes, a wasp hive grabbed me, the girls they all got wet, we had to sleep under a bridge.
The girls are scraped, their feet are very bad.
Let's rest what we can.
All members of Lempira's group seek to reach Mexico City.
Get your refugee status, get a job, settle down, stop running away.
Most are not the first time you have tried it, and it will not be the last.
Their greatest fear is neither what they are exposed to nor that they will be returned to their land, from which they will escape without a choice.
It is that they have to return to Tapachula.
That they have to start over.
"I can't go back."
Whatever happens, I have to keep moving forward.
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